To add the grid display to the expense report layout, navigate to the Administration module -> Application Settings tab -> Expenses Settings and select Expense Report Layout. If you have the Account module view, navigate to the Expenses module -> Options tab -> Expense Report Layout.

Check the option to Show a daily summary by expense item and this will add a grid to the expense report layout.

A word of caution – only use this option with expense reports that have a weekly period. Monthly expense periods and Open expense periods may cover too many days for the daily summary or grid to be visible or usable on the expense report.

In the January 2012 release of OpenAir, a new way to access Customer POs became available automatically from within the project. If you have already created the Customer PO and associated it to the project, you will now find a new menu option under the Financials menu (if you have the billing/recognition rule activated on the project stage). Customer POs now appears! From here, you can view the list of associated Customer POs to the project and even click into the details of the Customer PO record.

In order to view the Customer POs within the project, you still need to create the Customer PO in Administration -> Application Settings -> Invoice Settings -> Customer POs (or Account -> Account -> Customer POs) and associate it to the project on the project properties form by clicking ‘create’ next to the Customer PO option the form (slightly below the Notes text area).

“Prior to working with TOP Step we were operating manually off of spreadsheets for resource planning and tracking. “This extended our decision making process and had the potential to impact our responsiveness in time critical situations. As we continue to grow we feel we are well positioned with the tools and processes resulting from our work with TOP Step to effectively and efficiently support our client’s needs.”

– Tony Morelli, Vice President of Business Development and Technical Services

Hear more from Brad Scott, President and CEO:

“TOP Step Consulting worked with us in solving our resource management challenges. Our business is cyclical in nature with very high demand periods. It is critical during these periods of time to understand our resource availability and utilization. TOP Step helped us configure our OpenAir system based on our unique business model and the challenges we were facing. We now have the information to manage our resources efficiently and effectively. ”

- Joshua Keene, Partner, Johnson Lambert & Co. LLP

Hear more from Joshua Keene:

When reporting on forecasting in OpenAir, the charge projections functionality is widely used in conjunction with the resource management methodology and billing/revenue rules setup on the projects. For your fixed fee projects, the forecasting will produce a forecasted amount for either the value of the rule based on the date of the rule (fixed fee on date or milestone) or the value of the rule based on the date of the associated project/phase/task/milestone.

Recently a member of the user community reached out to TOP Step trying to work out why 2 reports were not providing the same information related to fixed fee projections. The configured summary report for forecasting was using Projected Billing value. Additionally, the customer was using the Advanced report called ‘Fixed Fee Projections’. Values were appearing in future months on the Fixed Fee projections but not on the user configured forecast report. The issue was found to be in the date ranges of the charge projections – the end date was set to be current month. This prevented the Projected Billing value from having any values after ‘this month’. The interesting find, however, was that the Fixed Fee Projections report appears to ignore the charge projections date range and therefore was able to help in finding this particular error.

Although running 2 separate reports is not normally suggested, it may be worthwhile to run the Fixed Fee Projections advanced report monthly and compare it to your fixed fee projected billing report to ensure all is well!

New Year, New Resolutions, right?  One that I always put on my list is ‘keeping up with my workload and staying current with technology’.  I put them together since they really work together.  Anyone remember getting a TripTik from AAA for a cross country drive?  Compare that to turning on your mobile phone navigator and speaking the destination to get a dynamic ‘from here to there’ map with voice prompts for driving.   Staying current with technology translates, in many cases, to saving time and being more productive.

Working with SaaS systems is no different.  Let’s take NetSuite OpenAIr, a strong PSA solution that has new feature releases every 6-8 weeks.  Can you even imagine how many system changes happen in just 1 year?  Well, actually I can because we at TOP Step take the time each release to evaluate those feature to get the most out of our investment and help our client base do the same.  For those of you who use NetSuite OpenAir, remember how to rename reports before the report edit function came out in 2011?  It was time consuming and avoided, basically, which resulted in poor report names in some cases or replicated reports that were hard to maintain against a standards list.

The extra challenge with keeping current in a SaaS product, I feel, is that the vendor makes the new features transparent for the most part so it’s really easy to forget to check ‘what is new’.   Buying and installing software packages, like QuickBooks, makes you stop and think about what changes are in the new software because the look and feel may change, menu items may change, and so forth.  Installing an upgrade of a product makes you think in terms of ‘what is new’.   When releases happen with SaaS products, you may not even realize anything changed because the vendor has done such a good job with configuration management to not impact you unless you want to be impacted.  Great plus!!!

But there is a downside.  Time goes by and you still haven’t found time to evaluate the new features – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it as the saying goes.  So now you’re 6 releases into the year and haven’t changed your use of the SaaS system.   What you may have missed may have been able to save you hours or days of effort (and frustration) in interacting with your system.   You may not have time to evaluate things on your own, but find a trusted vendor or partner to help out so you can also stay current.  It’s better to be Earnestly Current than Hopelessly Behind!!!

The Billing and Revenue Fixed Fee % complete rules are pretty handy in OpenAir to allow Project Managers or Project Owners to control completion of milestones which will trigger invoicing and revenue. By setting the milestone to 100%, a typical approach, allows the project owners to control the ‘when’ for actuals. Forecasting, however, must rely on something that OpenAir can see so the milestone date is the main driver when reviewing forecasted billing and revenue.

Milestones are essentially tasks in OpenAir with 0 hours. Because there is a task ‘aspect’ to a milestone, OpenAir will view the milestone as something that can be worked on. When using milestones you generally don’t assign people so you can just treat the milestone as open or closed (0% or 100%, respectively). If you are forecasting the milestone, one thing to keep in mind is that the date of the milestone must be on a working day according to your calendar. Why? If you set the date on the milestone to a Saturday and Saturday is not a working day in your calendar, OpenAir will automatically move the date of the milestone in the forecast and on the project task view to the following working day (Monday, for many customers). The task is something that could be ‘worked’ and therefore the date of the milestone pays attention to the work calendar.

Consider this when you set dates on milestones that are on or near the end of the month. A great example is a milestone set to March 31, 2012. This is a Saturday so for many of you this milestone would adjust its date to be Monday April 2, 2012. This makes the difference in forecasting March or April revenue!!

In this interactive webinar you will learn more about calendar usage in OpenAir and integration to OpenAir including:

• Data capture for effective and useful calendar use
• Vacation calendars for your teams
• Tips for using Outlook and Google Calendars with OpenAir

For those of you taking advantage of the Leave Accrual feature in OpenAir, it’s that time of year to check those balances according to your leave policy. Many companies expire some or all of their balances on December 31 (which fell on a Saturday in 2011). If your rule is setup to expire on December 31, check the frequency of when your leave accrual runs. If it runs once a week or once a month, you may have inadvertently expired balances before folks put the last of their timesheets in for the year.

Example:
Rule setup – Expire balances on December 31st
Run leave accrual – automatically each Monday
Accrual runs on January 2, 2012 (holiday for many companies) – positive balances expired
Timesheets are submitted on January 3, 2012 – vacation for previous week in December recorded resulting in negative accrual balances

Remember, negative balances do not expire (meaning 0 out at the end of the year). Any negative balances will appear to carry-over when a user views the Current Leave Balance link on the Home (in the Home, Dashboard, or Account module). To correct these, add a positive ‘accrual’ transaction manually to the users set of accrual transactions with a date of December 31.

In this interactive webinar you will learn more about delivery effort costing approaches including:

• User level cost tracking – what types of hourly costs to track, handling data access permissions, and more
• Cost transfers between departments/regions with considerations for at cost, standard rates, or mark-ups
• Adjusting cost to payroll hours for more accurate margin reporting