TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

Last year we spent a lot of time working on new integrations between other popular 3rd party apps and TeamworkPM. Our aim was to enable our users to easily pull and push data between their other favourite apps and ours.  

As you know we listen and one of the biggest requests that we have been getting recently is the ability to log time directly to Harvest. Accurate and timely billing is a hugely significant factor in every business’ cash flow, with the latest update to our Harvest integration we’ve made it easier to accurately record your time on clients projects and seamlessly reflect this in your invoices.

We released the first stage of our integration with Harvest back in May 2012. This allowed you to simply export invoices in Teamwork to Harvest.

This month we’ve rolled out part two of the Harvest integration. You can now start a Harvest Timer directly within TeamworkPM! The time will be then instantly be logged in your Harvest account.

To set this up, you will first need to have a Harvest account :-)

1) Navigate to  the settings section in the top right, select site settings, under the integrations tab you will see the following option:

2) This is a per project setting and must also be enabled within your individual projects. To do this from the overview section, select options in the top right, then project settings.

3) At the bottom of the setting page enable your Harvest time tracking

4) Now you can start logging your time straight to your Harvest account. From the task tab, select the task you wish to log time against and click into the task details page. In the top right corner you will see the new Harvest button.

5) Now simply hit the Harvest button and your timer will start running.

6) When you're finished stop the timer by clicking it again. This will be give you the option to send your time to Harvest for approval.

A couple of things to remember, when you select the project to log the time to:

In Harvest it is locked to that project. Once time has been approved in Harvest should you need to submit more time you will need to get the time approval removed.

You can only assign one Harvest project to a TeamworkPM project. Within TeamworkPM the setting must be enabled within each project for you to be able to log the time directly in Harvest.

We have also put together this short video to show you how to set up the Harvest timers in your account.

Today we have some great news for you. An online service called Zapier has now made integrating TeamworkPM with your other favourite online applications possible and more importantly really easy to do.

Have you ever wanted to create a new TeamworkPM task from a Zendesk ticket or automatically create a new Google Calendar event from a new TeamworkPM task. These are just a few of the things that are possible with Zapier.

Zapier is for busy people who know their time is better spent selling, marketing, or coding. Instead of wasting valuable time coming up with complicated systems - you can use Zapier to sync the web apps you and your team are already using on a daily basis.

Zapier is very straightforward to use.

The left hand side shows a trigger. The right hand side is an action. Zapier then watches for a trigger to happen before performing an action. I could spend ages telling you how easy Zapier is to set up but the best way to experience this is to visit their site and have a go yourself.

 

Although we have had Blinksale integrated for a while we never put together a blog post highlighing just how to get your billable time from TeamworKPM into Blinksale.

Below are the steps required to do this.

Step 1: Once you have your invoice sitting in TeamworkPM and you are ready to bill your client, click on "Export invoice" in the bottom left.

Step 2: This will popup the options you have for exporting your invoice. Select Blinksale and then hit export.

Step 3: The first time you do this, you will need to authenicate your Blinksale account. Enter in your Blinksale account URL, your email address and your password then hit Authenicate. Once this is done, this step will be skipped the next time you need to export an invoice.

Step 4: Pick the company the invoice is to be assigned to, enter the payment terms and the click on Export Invoice to Blinksale.

Step 5: The invoice is now sitting in your Blinksale account ready for you to send out.

Harvest was one of the first billing integrations we added so we just wanted to highlight this feature again for all our new users. This also gives us the chance to put together a step by step guide to exporting your time to Harvest.

Step 1: Once you have the time you want allocated to your invoice, click on Export Invoice.

Step 2: The next dialog shows the export options available. Pick Harvest as the service you wish to use.

Step 3: The very first time you connect to Harvest you will need to authenticate your account. To do this just enter in Harvest URL, your email address and password for your Harvest account.

Step 4: Once you are authenticated you will have the option to select a company from your Harvest account and assign the new exported invoice to them. Once you are ready click Export Invoice to Harvest.

Step 5: Your invoice will now be available in your Harvest account ready to send. Now it's time to sit back and wait to get paid!

The billing section within projects has seen a great number of 3rd party integrations over the last few months, and this month is no exception. Thanks mainly to the feedback you guys sent in, we kept the pressure on and went right ahead and added in another billing integration.

We are now proud to announce Xero is now another invoicing application that you can send your billable time to so you can invoice your clients.

If you already use Xero and now you want to know how to hook your TeamworkPM account up so that you can send your invoices, below are the steps involved.

Once you have logged your time marked as billable it will move through into the billing tab. The aim of the game here, is to have no time sitting in the unbilled area. Anytime left here is work you haven’t been paid for, which is never good ;-)

Now for those of you who haven’t used the billing section before I will quickly run through from the start what to do here:

Step 1: Set the user rate for this project.

Step 2: Create a new invoice by clicking on Add Invoice, and filling the details. 

Step 3: Pick the logged time that you wish to assign to the newly created invoice. You can either drag and drop the time onto the invoice or you can pick from the drop menu. You can create as many invoices as you like within a project to break up the invoicing. 

Step 4: Now click on Export Invoice in the bottom right.

Step 5: Pick the integration you wish to use. This time we are going to go with “Export ot Xero file” 

Step 6: Enter the customer name and the click on “Generate file”. This generates a .csv file that can then be imported into Xero. 

Step 7: Load up you Xero account and click Accounts and choose Accounts Receivable from the drop-down menu, then click on import.

Step 8: Locate your Teamwork Invoice file you just downloaded and click Import.

Step 9: is simply confirm the import and your done. Your billable time from TeamworkPM is now sitting in your Xero account ready to send.

With all the screen shots I put together it looks like a lot of steps to get through but all of this is done in well under a minute, and once you are doing this on a regular basis you will be flying through these steps.

For those of you using Xero we really hope you find this integration helpful and as always, any feedback or comments please let us know.

When we started out this year we made a decision that it would be the year of integrations with other apps. So far we have really stuck to this. This year you have seen some really useful systems linked to TeamworkPM such as Dropbox, Freshbooks, Google Docs, Harvest Blinksale, QuickBooks Online and now box.com.

For those of you who have already used Dropbox with TeamworkPM, box.com works in pretty much the same way. You select your top level box.com folder to add to your TeamworkPM account and then for each project you select both the folder and set the users that you want to have access to your box.com ffiles on that project.

Adding and removing access is dead simple. All the controls for each individual project are handled within each project's Settings page.

If you already use box.com within your business to handle large files and to share files with clients and work mates, having box.com now fully integrated into your TeamworkPM account is going to make managing and running your projects even more useful and efficient.

So how do you hook box.com into your account?

The first requirement is that you are using a Business 2, Corporate or Enterprise account.
Next you need to click on Settings->Site Settings and choose Integrations. Scroll down to the box.com section and authenticate your box.com account. Once authenticated you need to select your top lever folder to use within your TeamworkPM account. No user can browse above this top level root folder so choose wisely.

box.com is all set up and ready to attach to projects. Browse to a project where you would like to have access to box.com. Go the  Project Settings page and again scroll to the bottom where you will see all the box.com options.

The settings here let you turn on or off box.com on the project. You also pick the Box folder you wish to be use for the project and you also choose who you wish to have access to Box on this current project.

Once you have done this you will now have the option to attach files from your box.com account to tasks, comment and the files section within your projects.

It’s all pretty straight forward and easy to use. As with all our new features we hope you love this new addition and as always any feedback or questions you may have please let us know.

I am very happy to announce our fourth (and not final) billing integration; it is a big one. QuickBooks Online!

This integration works very similarly to our other integrations. There is one difference though, and that is in setting up the connection between Teamwork and QuickBooks Online. I have outlined the steps involved below. We hope you find it useful!

QuickBooks Online Setup

1. Choose an Invoice and click the Export Invoice link at the bottom of the page.

2. A dialog appears asking you to choose an export option. Choose QuickBooks and click the export button.

3. Another dialog appears asking for your connection key. To get your connection key click the "Set up connection" link on the top right.

4. This brings up another window asking you for your QuickBooks login details. If you are currently logged in this step will not apply.

5. Click "Continue".

6. Enter a connection name or leave it as the default "Project Management". Click "Continue".

7. Click the no option for login security.

8. This will bring up another window confirming your choice of login security. Click "I still want to turn login security off" to confirm. Then click "Create Connection".

9. This page will contain your connection page. Copy the connection key to you clipboard (The "copy to clipboard" link doesn't work consistently so do a manual copy of the key).

10. Now you can click continue and close the window.

11. Go back to your TeamworkPM Account and paste your connection key into the field. Click "Authenticate".

12. A loader should appear once your key has been authenticated and then a list of companies associated with your QuickBooks Online account should be loaded in.

13. Choose a company and click Export to QuickBooks.

14. You're done! When you go to export another invoice the list of companies should appear immediately.

This month we thought we would quickly highlight our developer zone. For those of you who aren’t aware of this we have a full API to allow 3rd party developers to extend the functionality of TeamworkPM by building their own custom apps, or by hooking TeamworkPM into other existing apps.

This month we would like to highlight a 3rd party timer app for the Mac made by the team at fuelcollective. The app, called Eon, is a time tracking app for the Mac.

It’s simple and easy to use and allows you to to set multiple timers up to record your time and then allows you to easily log the time directly into your projects.

You can read more about Eon and download the app from their website here.

If you too would like to have your app highlighted in our newsletter just send us an email to support@teamworkpm.net

It’s a fantastic feeling to be able to announce this integration. We’ve been working on this feature for quite some time, refining the functionality and battling with Google’s Docs API.

We wanted the Teamwork Google Docs integration to be as smooth and flexible as our Dropbox integration. At times it felt like fitting a round peg in a square hole. Google Docs are not exactly files and they are not placed in folders as such but live in Collections.

We looked at many other cloud apps out there and how they handled Google Docs and we found them lacking. All these apps just gave a list of your Google Docs. No categorization, no folder structure and no way to allow editing of these documents without first sharing them with the user.

We knew we could do better, and we did!

Like Dropbox, Google Docs can be shared with multiple users. This allows us to link one main Google Doc account in to each Teamwork account to be used as the document repository. Individual users can then share their documents with this main account and the files magically show up in Teamwork.

Hooking your Google Docs account into Teamwork is a very simple process. Click Settings in the top right of your Teamwork account, choose Site Settings and pick the Integrations tab.

From the "Integrations" tab you can connect your Teamwork account with Google Docs and allow access. Pick the top level folder to use within your TeamworkPM account and you're up and running!

I have also run through all these steps in the short video I have attached here so you can see exactly how to hook your Google Docs account up with Teamwork.

As you would have seen from the video, if you watched it ;-) was that you can also create Google Docs from within your TeamworkPM account. It's a great enhancement and something that was brought up a good few times by the users who took part in the beta test. So we took the feedback on board and Dan got to work building this in for the final release. We also added the ability to create "folders/collections"

The last really important thing to run through is the Access Control for a Google Doc. By default, linking a Google Doc in to Teamwork sets the access control on the document to be viewable by any person who has the link.

You can set this to one of 3 levels

1. Anybody with the link can view
2. Anybody with the link can view and edit
3. Do not modify the access control list - This means that you have to explicitly share the document with Google Account holders from inside Google Docs.

After I finished the video (typical ;-)) we made a slight change to highlight the Access Control settings more and make it more obvious to users.

As with all our new features, we really hope you like it. We enjoyed building it and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

We are excited to announce that we have just launched Dropbox integration for TeamworkPM!

We've been working hard on this for quite some time and it feels good to release this top requested feature for customers on the Business 2, Corporate and Enterprise plans.

 

How does the Dropbox integration work?

When you link a Dropbox account with Teamwork you can reference your Dropbox files through Teamwork so they appear within the files tab of your projects. The files reside on Dropbox so when you change a file on your local computer, the very latest version is available in Teamwork. This will also gives you the ability to reference the same file across all your projects easily without having to upload the files separately into each project. 

 

I'm itching to give it a go, how do I set this up?

Customers on the Business 2, Corporate or Enterprise plans get a new tab on the Site Settings page called Integrations. It's pretty easy once you visit that tab but here are some step-by-step instructions:

 

1. First thing you need to do is to allow Teamwork to access your Dropbox account.

To get to the Integrations section, click on Settings in the top right, then click Site Settings. On the settings page, click the new "Integrations" tab.

Click on Connect Dropbox button to go through the authorization process. You will be directed to the Dropbox website and prompted to log in. Once you log in to the Dropbox account you want to use with Teamwork, Dropbox will ask you if you want to allow Teamwork to connect to your Dropbox Account. Course you do, so click Allow.

 

2. Choose your top-level folder.

Dropbox will then send you back to your Teamwork account and you will be prompted to select the Top Level Folder for your Dropbox integration with Teamwork.

Don’t worry if you have other folders and files within your dropbox account that you don’t want others to have access to. Users will be limited to the Top Level Folder you select here and won't be able to browser below this.

Once you have successfully connected your Dropbox folder you're good to go!

 

Project Level Folders

Each project can have it's own Project Level Folder selected which users on your project are confined to. This can be selected in the "settings" tab of each project.

 

Settings Project Dropbox Permissions

When you choose a folder for a project, you can also specify who can browse and add files from this Dropbox folder to your Teamwork project.

If users have permission to access the Dropbox folder for a particular project, they will see a Dropbox button on the Files tab.

 

Browsing Dropbox and Linking in Files

Clicking the Dropbox button will now pull up a new file browsing interface for selecting a file (or files) from your Dropbox account and attaching it to the project you are working on. 

Once you have then selected the files you wish to upload to your project just click on "Link-in Selected Files" You also have the option to quickly view a thumbnail of any images within your Dropbox folder by hovering your mouse over the file for a second.

Clicking "Link-in Selected Files" will add the Dropbox files to your project. You can easily see at a glance which files are linked to from your Dropbox account via the logo displayed under the files.

 

And there's more....

When you create a new task or message (if you have permission to use Dropbox on the project) you will see a new option when choosing a file called "Dropbox". This allows you to choose and link the Dropbox files while you are creating your task or composing a message.