Monthly and weekly reports available in Project Hours

The Project Hours report section has been updated with monthly and weekly status reports. This is a popular feature requested by users and a big enhancement to the Project Hours reporting feature. Often time sheets are on a weekly or monthly base so that is why our customers asked for this. Check it out on Project Hours or Project Hours NL.

The reports are easy to generate: users can select a time range to generate reports for and download the weekly or monthly statements in Excel.

Example of a weekly statement in Excel:

 That's it for now, more features to follow!

Regards,

Bert-Jan

New web sites live!

Project Hours has new web sites with product information, a blog and time tracking articles! The websites are build by Imre de Groot from Gegist Bestek Marketing. A huge leap forward compared to the old home pages:

• More product information in a much friendlier navigation structure.
• Optimized for SEO, Project Hours will be easier to find in search engines.
• Built in Wordpress, completely seperate from the time tracking functionality (a .Net site), much easier to update and maintain, no need to deploy all code for a content update.

Check out the English site on projecthours.online or the Dutch site on projecthours.nl and let me know what you think! Tips for improvement are welcome.

New feature: planning board

On request of a client I added a planning board to Project Hours. This will allow for specifying hours that are planned for a project and a comparison with hours that are actually registered. 

Many clients still do this kind of planning in Excel. This is prone to errors, it is easy to accidentally erase data, or even delete the excel file that holds the administration. The Project Hours planning board is a more robust and user-friendly way to keep track of planned hours. Hours can be planned per user, for a project or for activities in a project.

Hopefully many users will benefit from this new feature!

Let me know what you think of it..

Regards,

Bert-Jan

New feature: Register Materials and Costs

Today Project Hours received a new feature, it is now possible to register materials and calculate totals material costs for projects.  The feature has been developed based on feedback from several users. Currently materials can only be registered via the website, the mobile apps will follow soon..

Below are the new screens that are now available:

Define material units

Register materials with projects

Create overviews and download Excel reports

That's all for now. Next step will be to include this feature in the mobile apps. 

Please try out the new functionality and do not hesitate to send feedback to info@projecthours.net!

Regards,

Bert-Jan

New feature: multiple hourly rates per user

On request of a client a new feature has been added to Project Hours: multiple hourly rates per user. This is useful because often users work in different roles on a project and each role can have a different hourly rate. To use this feature, go to 'Administration, Hourly Rates', specify your rates and enable the feature. Currently this is only available when entering hours via the web site, mobiles apps will follow soon..

Working on Outlook integration for Project Hours

The redesigned apps for iPhone and Android are live in the stores now, time for the next improvement.. A customer asked for Outlook integration! Great idea, this will allow users to enter time directly from the calendar, for instance to register meeting time. Improved productivity and an opportunity to advertise Project Hours in the Outlook Add-in store :-)

So I am investigating what is needed to create a Project Hours Outlook add-in. Outlook web add-in, security, a design for the plugin. The plugin will allow for selecting a project and activity in Project Hours and storing this together with the meeting duration and date. And there will be a button to jump to the full project hours web site for more advanced things like updating time entries or checking time entries for that week.

I have a simple add-in up and running, I have a security design in mind, check  Privacy and security for Office Add-ins for some considerations,  now it is a matter of building all this. To be continued..

Beta testing voor new mobiles apps started

Public beta testing is now on-going for both the iOS and the Android apps for Project Hours! We completed the internal testing round, many issues were ironed out. 

A challenge was to get listview items in projects and activities lists to fold out correctly when tapped on by the user, especially on iOS. Also, initially some page crashed in release mode because of empty properties in the xaml page make-up. The strange thing was that these pages showed up ok in debug configurations, but apparantly release mode is less forgiving.  The xamarin forum is very useful to find answers: One of my questions on the Xamarin Forum

You can try-out the Android and iOS beta's on: (note that if you install this, your phone will write hours to a test database, you will have to unsubscribe to return to production).

Join beta on Android

Join beta on iPhone

Any help is much appreciated!

Regards,

Bert-Jan