This is the second in a series of videos from Replicon that showcase the project related functionality within the product. In the first video, available from our website, we took a look at how to quickly add projects to Web TimeSheet to gain visibility into what your users were entering time towards. Then we entered time towards those projects and reported out details on a project by project basis.

In this video we are going to drill down even further into project setup, to see how we can add estimates for cost, expenses, and even actual hours to gain greater visibility into our project statuses- whether they are on track, over budget, etc.

Once you have projects entered into web timesheet, and users are actually entering time into their timesheets, you have visibility into which projects each user is working on, and you have the ability to restrict which projects users are working on. That may not be enough information determine whether your projects are profitable or not, whether they are over budget, whether you have way too many expenses or costs associated with a specific project.

All of these can be tracked within web timesheet, we're going to show you how by taking advantage of some of the estimated fields inside of project. We will navigate to the project screen by clicking on the projects icon in the toolbar at the top, and we will open up the project "New Website Extranet”, this is a project we created previously; you'll see some of the generic high-level information relating to this project. Now in the lower right hand corner you will see the project structure tree with various tasks and sub-tasks, the very top level will be the actual project.

So, if we drill down into the 'design' tasks of the External Public Web section of the project tree, you'll notice some additional fields we can take advantage of. Namely the estimated hours and the estimated costs field. The estimated hours for this task is going to be 30, and we will put an estimated cost in of $1200 based on the rates of the employees that I would have working on this task. Clicking save at the bottom with apply these changes to the project. And if we navigate back to the actual timesheet, you'll see there is an immediate change that is apparent to users.

So, because I have a task on my timesheet that actually has estimates towards it, you'll notice a progress bar appear on the right hand side. This progress bar is a permission so if you want specific users to see or not see this you can turn it on or off for each user. This progress bar is a visual indicator of all the hours that have been entered towards this task compared to the actual estimates of hours that it will take to complete it.

So, right now the task bar is telling me that so far 5 hours have been entered towards this task that represents 17% of the total, which is 30 as we've entered it on the task at the project. We go ahead and populate some additional items on this task, you'll see that this progress bar is dynamic and that it actually updates with each entry that I make to the time sheet. Now, to see how the estimated costs that we entered on the project affect output we will have to move to the report screen. We’ll do this by clicking the reports button in the navigation bar at the top of the screen. This brings up of course a listing of all the reports within the system.

We scroll down to project reports and choose the project time analysis report. We see an output of time for all the projects in the system- this can be a lot to go through, so we want to filter this down to just the specific project we were looking at- or entering time towards on our timesheet, and that was the New Website Extranet project.

So we're going to run this report again, and now you can see here that it is only the project that you want to see and analyze. It shows that we have 11 billable hours, towards that task that we entered hours for, you can see that if we click the settings button, we can view some additional fields that are going to help us, one being cost amount, and if we scroll down, we should also see task remaining hours, we can save these right at the bottom here, re-run the report.

So again, from a project leader perspective here is we focus on the actual design task, we can see it now shows us the total hours, the task remaining hours based on our estimates, and a cost amount. To gain the cost amount, it is actually taking the user cost from my user profile and multiplying it by the hours that I've entered on the timesheet towards this task.

Now, from this screen project leaders can see remaining hours towards tasks, and if there is any low values there, then they can take action, as well as any cost amount if they see they are overrunning the budget that they have allocated for this project. As with all the reports in the system, this report can be emailed on a scheduled basis to relevant people within the company, so PMs can view this data on a regular basis and make project decisions fairly quickly.

Now, that showed us one way we can use estimated hours and estimated costs to show up on the timesheet and then on reports. But the other aspect of project costing is, of course, the expenses entered towards the project over and above the time entry. So, if we go back tot he project screen, we open up our extranet website again, and if we drill down tot he actual project details this time, you'll notice there is an estimates expenses field. I'm going to go ahead and populate this with $1000. Save that, and then go to my expense entry screen, we’re going to add a new expense sheet, give it a brief description; we’re going to add the Extranet Project so that my expenses are associated with it.

Going to enter an expense here for airfare, there are several types of expenses I can use, only those applicable to this project will be displayed to me. I want to be reimbursed for this because I put it on my personal credit card, and the flight was $340; I also have the ability to upload an electronic image of the receipt, and attach it to the sheet as well for approvers to see. I am going to go ahead and save this expense sheet, and I'm going to go ahead and submit it for approval, and go back to my reports.

I'll be able to look at a project report that actually takes time and expenses into account on the same report. We will take a look at the project status report here; again, this is a lot of data to consume in one report, since we are only looking for specific details we are going to change our project filter to show us a specific report. De-select them all by default, and then click the one we want to see, choosing to run report again will bring up details related to the project.

So you'll see here from the project level it is going to show us hours towards the tasks, hours, expenses entered, so you can see from this report it is going to show us tasks and expenses, amounts that are associated with them at the project level, in addition to the estimates on a per task basis, it is also going to show us our percentage complete on a per project basis.

Now that same estimated field that we used for costs and hours is also available from an estimated expenses perspective. Saving these settings and running the report again, will allow me to see the project estimated expenses as well.

So, just to recap, we've taken a look into drilling further down into project fields, adding estimates for costs, estimates for hours and estimates for expenses, and then reporting those out through the standard reports that are part of web timesheet.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us in one of the following ways, and have a great day.

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