Sneak Peak: Professional Timesheets for LiquidPlanner
December 15th, 2008 by Charles Seybold
The development team at LiquidPlanner is approaching our “feature complete” milestone for our new time tracking capability. We are super excited about what this feature set offers professional service organizations who need to generate invoices as well as those teams that like to analyze and account for their time.
Our approach to timesheets recognizes that most professional time-tracking data moves from the front-line tool to back office systems so we’ll ship with the ability to export time-tracking data to QuickBooks, CSV, and XML formats.
Where we have spent most of our time is making sure this feature is fully integrated into the LiquidPlanner project management experience and not just some kind of bolted on old school timecard. In general, who really likes timecards? I mean let’s be honest - nobody - unless that’s how you happen to get paid. If you do have to account for your time, then we think it should to be as frictionless as humanly possible. To that end, we’ve spend a ton of time re-designing parts of LiquidPlanner to make easy timesheets a reality.
The personal timesheet is probably the fastest editing page in LiquidPlanner. It’s built with fast client side JavaScript and has asynchronous updates. It very smart about what tasks show up on it and it is integrated with a second generation of LiquidPlanner’s auto-track feature. It’s so slick that maybe even managers and executives will start tracking their time.
This is scheduled to launch early next year.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Oooooooh, like a kid in a candy shop! You guys never cease to impress me. Looks great!
December 15th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
This looks great! It will be very helpful for invoicing and tracking time. I can see this as a huge benefit to some of my clients.
Nice work!
December 15th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Man you guys are on the ball!
Any thoughts about widgetizing this function? (e.g., in Yahoo! widgets, Google Gadgets, or what-have-you?)
Also, I don’t know if you guys use Mozilla Ubiquity, but once an API is available, that would be a great way to trim activation energy for common LP tasks.
Gary Hodgson’s Remember The Milk implementation for Ubiquity is an exemplary implementation of task tracking via this interface:
http://garyhodgson.com/ubiquity/rtm-api.html
Worth a looksee as you guys are developing Liquid Planner.
Thanks for all the smart and regular development on this product!
January 16th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
importing possibilities for the timesheets should be great too.
i’m using a tool to take remote control of systems, which deliver a logfile to use for import in other applications.
will this be option too?
regards, kristof
January 16th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
No import for this first version. There will be export of course and you can merge your external logging with LP logging in Excel, a DB, or your accounting software.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Since LP allows the saving of utf-8 data (I tried it with Japanese), I hope the export of the CSV and XML will also fully support this. If you want some Japanese to test with, please email me. I am willing to help by giving you some simple Japanese phrases to test with, or, entering some Japanese into a test system.
Kind regards,
Rick Cogley
Tokyo