We want to give you a quick update on the new features that we
have released this past month. The features in this release focuses
on giving you more ways of tracking your budget to make it easier
for you to complete your projects both on time and on budget. In
addition to the currently available fixed hours budgeting option,
you can now also specify your project budget using either retainer
or fixed fee.
Retainers
The retainer budget option allows you to specify a retainer for
your projects. This is useful if your clients agrees to pay you a
retainer for a specified amount of service. Retainers can be
weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly and you can specify a start
and end date for the retainer. We automatically track how your time
is tracking against the retainer and notify you and your team
members if the retainer is exceeded. You can override a retainer
for any month from the "Retainers" page (accessible from the
"Admin" menu). The retainer is automatically reset for you each
month without any additional effort on your part.
Fixed Fee Budget
The fixed fee budgeting option allows you to enter a fixed money
amount for your projects. The accrued amount will be calculated by
multiplying the tracked time with the hourly rate specified for the
time entry. A default hourly rate must be specified for fixed fee
projects but you can override the default when adding time entries.
You can see how your actual is tracking against the budgeted amount
from the project status report. Like the other budgeting options,
you can specify that team members be notified when the fixed fee
budget is exceeded.
Configure Project Member Visibility
You can now specify which project members are able to view each
other within a project. For example, you can specify that project
members are not able to see each other for a specific project. This
is useful if you want to create a project for sharing documents
common to all your projects. You can invite your team members and
clients from all your projects to this project so that they can
view the common documents without being able to see each other. The
new setting is available when creating or editing a project as the
"Who can see other project members?" option.
Membership Plans
We have finally written up a thorough explanation of the various
combinations of membership plans and project roles and which users
need to be on what plans. Previously, this information was
available but it was scattered throughout our FAQs and help pages.
Please take a look at
understanding membership plans
for the new document that centralizes this information. Please
note that we have finally started enforcing some restrictions that
were previously listed in our FAQ but not enforced by our app (such
as not allowing free team members from assigning task/milestones to
other team members). Free team members who already have an account
will be able to continue assigning tasks/milestones but accounts
created after today will be subject to the limitation.
Reports
Clients can now view the hours budget report.
Upcoming Features
We have begun work on an API (Application Programming Interface)
that will allow you to integrate TeamWork Live with other programs
and services. We are running a little late with the release date
but hope to have the feature available by mid-May.
Link to this page