Scheduling reports in Time Manager Part 1

In my last post I told you how, in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager reports could not be sent to a separate Scheduling and Alerts engine.  Today I am going to extend that concept and tell you a little about how reports can be scheduled.  You can view a five minute video of the process by clicking here.

Offloading reports to another process is only of limited use.  However, setting up a report once and then running it at regular intervals becomes much more interesting.  It allows you to pass a great deal of administrative work out to the alerts engine.

An example might be a productivity report you run once a month on the third of each month for the previous month.  Instead of having to remember to open Time Manager, select the report, select what data to appear on the report and run it, you can now set this up as a scheduled report and have it delivered to your inbox automatically.

The video will show you more about how scheduling of reports works.

Next time I will tell you about distribution lists and some of the other alert functions which do not rely on reporting.

Time Manager Alerts

I am just putting the finishing touches to the initial release of the Time Manager Alerts functionality.  This is a major enhancement both for Time Manager and to a smaller extent Profess.

The feature will be available in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager which is still pencilled in for the end of September.  Hosted users will find this installed and available automatically.  Installed users of Time Manager will need to install and configure the Alerts service.  Full documentation will be available on release.

At present the following functionality is available:

• Run any report on a schedule and send back to yourself or a distribution list.  You can enter flexible selection criteria that are evaluated at the time the report is run.  This means you could run a report for This Month, or Last Month, This Week, or Last Week and it would use the dates that apply when it is run.
• Calculate and distribute Missing Timesheets.
• Calculate and distribute Missing Timesheets by Team Manager.  This is nice and simple, just set it up once and leave it run.  The calculation takes care of who to send the report to for all members of a managers Team.
• Look for and inform individual staff if they have not Submitted or Completed a Timesheet on time.

Other alerts can be added in, but these are the ones users have requested so far.

If you have any ideas for alerts that would be useful both to you and others, please get in touch with me so we can decide how achievable they are, as we are actively looking to add new alert functionality.

Running Reports in Profess

When you’re running a Report using the standard Build Selection screen, did you know that if you want to run the Report again, but for a different Project/Client/Staff Member, etc., you don’t need to close the Report down and start again?

When you’ve filled out the standard Build Selection screen once, and the selection code is still visible in the Preview area, click on Build Selection then click the Selection tab.  From here you can edit the Selection code, over-typing any of the references to search on something else. 

Just make sure you keep the single quote marks around what you’re searching for if it’s a Reference. 

You’ll find this is speedier that starting all over again. This is also a good way of using Saved Selections.