Month: January 2010

Hi everyone, time for some more feature news! Last week we reported about improved time tracking & hourly rates. With those features, it’s possible to create reports that include – not only the spent time – but also the price, depending on the hourly rates. As the reports can now also be used for billing purposes, we’re now announcing a new feature that makes it easier to extract this data and use it for invoicing.

Export of Reports to Excel

Reports can now be exported to Excel, using either the CSV (Comma Separated Values) or HTML format. For our European users that write numbers like “1.000,50”, rather than “1,000.50”, we added the option ;CSV, which stands for Semicolon Separated Values (as the comma is used to decimal values).

Although CSV is the more traditional way of importing data into Excel, the advantage of HTML is that all character sets are supported. This means you shouldn’t have any problems with non-English languages.

To export, simply create or open a Report, click ‘Export’ and select the format. To import the file in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program), just click Open and select the file.

Note: in Business Teams, only people with the ‘Billing’ permission are allowed to Export reports.

New Export menu

Excel HTML output. Simply Open in Excel to import.

Export of Reports to MoneyBird

This feature is mainly for our Dutch users, that are using MoneyBird. MoneyBird is a nice web application from another Dutch company, for easily organizing, managing and sending invoices. You can now directly convert your Thymer Report into a MoneyBird invoice, simply by clicking ‘Export’ and selecting the ‘MoneyBird’ option. You will be forwarded to MoneyBird where you can login and authorize Thymer to create a new invoice for you.

An invoice in MoneyBird, as exported by Thymer

Updated ‘More..’ Projects Dialog

We also refreshed the design of the More projects dialog. As before, Thymer displays as many projects on top as fit on your screen. All other projects go in the “More” dropdown. You can turn on or off the dropdown in Settings -> Lists & Menus. Here you can also change the order of your projects, so that the projects you access most are always shown on top. Depending on how many projects you have, and the resolution of your screen, the More projects dialog now shows your projects in one, two or three columns. We hope this gives a much better overview. It also completely colors the project titles. To make it easier to select a project from the dropdown menu, you can use the full width of a project row to click on it.

Just a few more projects. Shown in one column.

Some more projects, in two column mode. With three columns, you can easily choose between 50 or more projects.

New permissions

We received some feedback of users who wanted to use Thymer as a tool for issue management. Some users should be allowed to report new issues, but not change their status and edit them. We therefore added a new permission level to projects, between “View & Comment” and “Full Access” – “View, Comment & Add”.

We hope you like the new additions!

More feature news! Today we are releasing quite a few new features.

Hourly Rates
When tracking time, it’s now possible to use hourly rates for billable tasks. You can create as many different rates as needed. When opening the time track pane, a drop down appears with the various rates (if the task is billable). It’s also possible to assign a default rate to a certain project. This rate will then be selected by default. As one of our goals is to keep Thymer as simple as possible, using hourly rates is entirely optional. If, on the other hand, you work a lot with billable tasks, we also made things a bit easier: you can now make projects billable by default. Every new task added to this project is made billable by default.

You can set Billing options for a project by clicking ‘More options’

The rates only specify the amount per hour, not the currency. A default can be set per project, as well as globablly. You can add as many different kinds of currencies as needed. A currency is simply a label, so if for some reason you find it convenient to use kilometers or miles as a currency, go ahead.

Set currency, default rate, and project billable flag.

Specify as many rates as needed.

We also introduced a new permission: Billing. Only users with the Billing permission can add, edit and remove hourly rates. Users without the permission can only select which rate to use for their time tracking entries, and they won’t be able to see the actual rates, only the descriptions. (Billing permission is always enabled for users with a Small Team or Professional account).

New Billing settings tab, accessible by users with Billing permission.

Improved Time Tracking
Besides selecting an hourly rate for billable changes, we introduced some other improvements to the time tracking dialog. Next to using a timer, or manually typing in the number of spent hours, it’s now possible to enter the amount of hours by selecting a begin and end time. “Previous entry” selects the end time of the previous change entry. Also new is the ability to toggle the billable flag from inside the time tracking pane. Furthermore, the timer can now be paused! If you click the ‘pause’ button under the timer, the timer is paused and the dialog is hidden. When you click the “play” button for this task again, the timer resumes. The timer is also automatically paused if you click the “play” button for another task. This way, if you’re working on a task, but you’re interrupted by another task, you can simply switch back and forth. Another new option is to track time for past dates, by using the new calendar control in the time track pane.

Improved Time Tracking: Rates, Pause/Resume Timer, Toggle Billable flag, Begin/end time.

New Reports

The reports feature has been updated to use the new hourly rates. Reports now show prices for billable tasks and projects. This way you can keep track of project budgets, or use it to bill clients or as a template for invoices. Reports created by users without the billing permission do not include the price, only the rate descriptions.

A report of different projects with different rates and currencies is also possible.

Feed Preview

To make it easier to keep track of recent changes by other team members, we introduced a Feed summary on the Task List page.

Other fixes and changes

– If you use the Notification Email feature, you’ll notice that we changed the format of these emails a bit. It shows more useful information in the subject line and name now, and you can jump right into comments.

– It’s now possible to collapse and expand the date separators of other team members (this will not affect their preferences)

– Some users reported problems with the project tabs under Webkit browsers (Safari / Chrome) under Snow Leopard. It showed some weird black lines, and only in these browsers and only in Snow Leopard. This was a really strange bug (a problem with the PNG image format). Thanks everyone for the feedback.

– Date separators now show both the begin and the end date of the date section.

– If no end date is selected for a Report, “Today” is used as default.

Hope you enjoy the new features. We’ll be back soon with more feature news!