aC forum: Time Budgets

Post #32 by spletnisistemi.si

spletnisistemi.si — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:27:57 CEST

Hi everyone,

we developed ticket budget module for AC for our needs.
It is simple and very usefull extension that solved our issue.

Budget module is designed for time and financial review of your projects. With its help you could quickly see at which tasks you are successful and which project does not follow as planned.

You can control, eliminate errors and anticipate your further projects – by aspect of time and finance.

More about this module you can find here:
http://shop.spletnisistemi.si/budget-module-activecollab.html

or just contact us on prodaja@spletnisistemi.si

Post #31 by tonymoon

tonymoon — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:18:14 CEST

I would love to be able to add hourly rates to different users and multiply that by the number of hours each user has done to compare it against the project total budget.

Also, a running scale of percentage of hours used for a project would be handy. Happy to contriute $$$ to a module.

Post #30 by Ilija Studen

Ilija Studen — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:36:43 CEST

Hello Sean,

Thank you for the detailed feedback.

We don't have plans to move activeCollab 3 in that direction, sorry. Initial release will definitely not have task estimates and project budgets, but we'll consider these features in the future (no promises though). Concept of "activity" is something that I can't quite wrap my mind around (maybe I just need more info to better understand it), so I doubt we are working on anything similar :)

If you need budgeting and estimates, we recommend that you consider building these features in as a module instead of waiting for us to add it.

Post #29 by Alaress

Alaress — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:00:34 CEST

Basically we need to have an activity module and enter time against a project AND an activity.

Post #28 by Alaress

Alaress — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:57:13 CEST

Hi Ilija,

We need to be able to do the following in our business:

- Analyse a project on a milestone level to see how profitable the project was.
- Simplify our billing to clients on a time and materials basis.

Our problems with AC would be fixed with the following added functionality (much of this functionality is available in workflowmax):

Add activity/task management module to AC (e.g. Web Design - Wireframes, Web Design - Concepts, Web Development - front end programming, Web Development - deployment). This would enable us to add our own export functionality to MYOB so that we could streamline the invoice creation for on-going clients whom we invoice on a time and materials basis for each month.

Add tasks to a project with descriptions. e.g. Web Development - Backend Programming - "product module".

Add cost and time estimates and/or fixed budgets to tasks on a project basis, enabling project reporting against time budgets per task.

Add ability for users select which activity they were completing when entering time records against a project.

Currently in active collab we are unable to log time to a set of pre-defined activities/tasks. We would like to be able to add a list of tasks into AC for selection at the time entry point. These activities/tasks would be matched against time estimates or fixed costs that we enter per task per project. This would basically be a copy of our quote for a client, entered into AC. Then we could export the time entries and import them into our accounting platform (MYOB) for billing.

To handle our ongoing work and adhoc updates that we do for clients we would have a project for every client called "Adhoc Services" and we would log our time against our tasks/activities to this project and we would generate our monthly on-going invoices from this data.

We would happily build major components if you can delegate which areas you would need to complete and which we would complete to help get this out the door asap.

Thank you so much in advance. We do love your software and hope we can work together to get these features.

Who else you benefit from this?

Kind regards,
Sean.

Post #27 by Ilija Studen

Ilija Studen — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:47:51 CEST

Hello Sean,

We are glad to hear that you business has grown significantly in the past years. What I miss in your message are exact problems (not features or competing products) that you are experiencing with current activeCollab feature set. What problems would you like activeCollab to be address in the upcoming releases?

PS: Our goal with activeCollab was never to include every feature imaginable or available in the competing products, but create a well balanced project collaboration product with just the right amount of picked features.

Post #26 by Alaress

Alaress — Mon, 17 May 2010 08:44:21 CEST

We are due for renew and will not be renewing this year after 4 years with you and are going to have to head to a different software provider if we cannot get this feature added really soon (like the next 2-3 weeks).

As our company has grown, we need much better methods of time tracking and billing. Tracking employees time throughout the day to AC is all fine but could still be better, look at getharvest.com for example. Billing from AC is terrible and the invoicing module is so basic it shouldn't have been released yet.

Take a look at worlflowmax.com. Their interface is shithouse but the functionality is much better that AC's is to date. They also just released a good job scheduling interface that is quite impressive.

IIila, can you take a look at this software PLEASE: http://previewstreamtime.com/au/

Can you please explain to us how close your roadmap is to creating software such as this or are you heading in a totally different direction?

Kind regards,
Sean.

Post #25 by dan.syme

dan.syme — Tue, 11 May 2010 03:36:23 CEST

We use your reports module and my only issue holding us back from the planning module is flash, which does not allow use to extend the extension as needed. We to are open to collaborating on a module of this type, as it is greatly needed. It is probably what will most like turn us away from activeCollab as a replacement for daylite.

Post #24 by Nirav M.

Nirav Mehta — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:06:32 CET

FWIW, Planning module for activeCollab allows you to estimate time for tasks, milestones, tickets, checklists and pages. You can the use activeCollab's time tracking feature to add time to these items. Coming back to Planning module will show you the actual vs estimated time for each item.

It will even total up the estimates / actual times.

HTH.

Post #23 by [user deleted]

[user deleted] — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:07:13 CET

We are also open to collaborate on this module! No need to reinvent the wheel ;)