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.

It is an easy thing to do to create a time log in the wrong place, especially if you are in a rush or logging all your time at once. Up until now it has not been possible to move a time log from one project to another.

To correct this you then would have to go through the arduous process of finding the time log, selecting the time log, remembering the information, creating it in the other project and finally deleting the time log from the original project. Sounds like a lot of work!!

Not anymore, we have received tons of feedback asking us “Can I move a time log?” We are delighted now to say that “Yes you can and it is really easy to do :-)”.

To move a time log from one project to another:

• Navigate to the project you have created the time log in.
• In the lower left hand pane you will see the option to Move time logs.
• Select this and a light box will open.
• This will display all the time that has been logged on this project.
• From the dropdown select the project you wish to move the time to.
• Select the time logs to move.
• Move selected.
   

If you deal a lot with time logs then you are going to love this new feature as it will make TeamworkPM even easier for you to use.

As someone who was always responsible for quoting for new work back when we had a consultancy business, having a feature like our new Task Estimates would have really helped me gauge if I was quoting realistically for jobs and more importantly if we were making money on these projects.

There can sometimes be a massive gap between the time you quote for and the time you actually end up working....and it’s very rare that it’s in your favor.

We have been planning this new feature for quite a while and over the last 2 months in particular the amount of requests we received for this just grew and grew. This added to the motivation to push this feature up the Roadmap and to get it rolled out.

You now have the ability to add estimated time to a task. This feature will now really help you become even more organized. It will help you plot out the amount of time a project is going to take and for those of you that charge and quote by the hour this is going to become a vital tool.
Now over time you will be able to compare the time you estimated to the actual time you logged on the project.

With this new feature comes some very nice new reporting extras. The new workload chart and the extended Task list time report.

Right, so how does this feature work?

When creating tasks you will have the option to add an estimated time. This is available in the new Progress tab. Enter in the hours and minutes you think it will take to complate the task and save.

We also added a quick way to add estimated time to tasks. On the task page you will notice a plus sign as you place your mouse over tasks. Click this to quickly add estimated time for that task.
Once you have estimates added to your tasks across your projects you can view our new Workload chat. A lot of you have been looking for this. This new chart shows you the amount of work that you and your team have on across all your projects between certain dates. If a few of you have 20 hours work to do in 8 hours you might need to split the work up a bit ;-)
You can also see from this workload chart the estimated time verses the actual time logged

The last report that has changed is the time report on a task list. If you run this you get a break down of the total time estimated, actual logged time and whats billable across all the tasks.

We really hope you enjoy this new feature and as always, if you have any feedback, please send it on.

We have just released Version 1.34 of the Teamwork PM Desktop Timer App.

This version brings the following updates:

Be sure to let us know what you think by adding a comment to this post!

Dan.

A lot of people work with contractors in Teamwork and have requested that we add a setting so people can view time they logged but not time that other people logged.

Yesterday I totted up the number of Requests from Feedback on this item and decided to implement a new permission View other people's time

The change is now live in the app. For existing users, this is turned on by default so existing users time reporting will work as normal. You can now edit each person's permissions and un-check this permission if you only want them to be able to see time they logged.

Hope you like this improvement.

Dan.

For the last few weeks I've been busy working on our first Desktop app for Teamwork to make logging time faster and easier.

Using the web app, you can only have one active timer running at any one time. This was by design. We wanted an easy to use tool within the app to help people measure the time spent they spent working on a task or project.

As Teamwork is used by a multitude of different businesses and teams, we wanted to also offer a more advanced, flexible and feature rich add-on using the API that could benefit from technologies not available to a web app. Features such as minimizing to the System Tray (on Windows) or the Dock (on Mac), auto-pause when the computer is idle (and resume when user is active again), multiple account support (for people jumping between Teamwork accounts), multiple timers etc

In the first version due to be released in late December or early January the following will be available:

- Multiple timers and fast switching between them
- Select your Teamwork projects
- Optionally choose a task from the current project
- Auto-Pause and Resume when the computer is idle. You can decide how long the threshold is in the settings.
- Always on top of all other windows setting
- Minimize App to tray or dock
- Automatic saving/loading of timers when app loads or quits
- Edit/Add/Delete timers
- Pause/Resume timers
- Log time to your Teamwork account

I built the app using AIR and Flex so this is going to be a cross-platform app for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The API must be enabled for your user account in Teamwork to be able to log time.

Future plans include the ability to update your Teamwork status from within the app. We have some changes to make first to the way Status messages work in the main web app and this Desktop version will compliment the planned changes nicely.

Dan.