Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] Hi. We're making a lot of changes.

[Jamie Lawrence]

On Thu, 05 Sep 2002, Brian Johnson wrote:

> I made some changes to Timetrack but haven't posted them yet
> 
> My changes allow the administrator to assign a billout rate for each employee 
> and a
> bill-out rate multiplier for each defined task.  Then when time is added, new 
> fields
> have been added to track the charges against a project as well as the time 
> assigned
> to the project

All good. We've mainly been working on integrating the address book and
projects app, as well as making some other minor UI changes to make it
a bit more sane. 
 
> It adds a new admin screen to control which users get to see the current 
> charges per
> project on the job status screen
> 
> I also made a few changes that are flagged by a variable in the new admin 
> screen
> (not visible - you have to edit the source code to activate them).  It was an 
> easy
> way to test changes without affecting everyone.
> 
> These changes include changing the timesheet summaries to not summarize the
> employee's time by project (it lists all the entries for the week showing).  
> It also
> changes the project numbering system to not restart the project numbering for 
> each
> customer but to match our numbering system that, for each location, we restart
> project numbering each year and increment it as projects start regardless of 
> who the
> customer is (eg 1020020003 means location 10, year 2002, project 0003)
> 
> I also grabbed the invoice creation routine from ck-ledger but haven't had 
> time to
> modify it to make it work - I can discuss the logic behind that direction if 
> you like

These are interesting. We've been modifying them to (again) interoperate
a bit better with the Projects module, and summarize by client/employee,
to better facillitate billing (the projects billing code simply doesn't
work for us).

> I have investigated standardizing on a contact system and decided that 
> currently,
> addbook is the module to use - but haven't modified Timetrack for that yet. 
> The
> reasons for that include the fact that projects should be assigned to a 
> company (not
> an individual in the addressbook module since there could easily be more than 
> one
> individual per company).  Right now that means the addbook or cdb modules - 
> but cdb
> doesn't have any gui set up yet.  A few weeks ago, a method to modify a module
> (addbook for example) to have it check that another module wasn't referring 
> to one
> of it's records before deleting a record was outlined on this mailing list

I fully agree that client should be a company, not a person. People
should be assignable, insofar as they are associated with a given
project, but contracts are with companies, not people (normally).

> Getting a time entry system for our projects (with an invoice creation 
> routine) is a
> goal for us right now.  We have an MS Access database for clients and 
> projects (and
> related stuff) that I would like to port over to PostgreSQL but would like to 
> do it
> in such a way to easily adapt to add the ability for employees to add time to 
> projects
> 
> I would like to coordinate changes with you if you don't mind
> 

I'd love to chat more about this. Mail me privately if you'd like a
login to see what we have done thus far. I'd like to get our code merged
back in to the main tree, just so that upgrades are easier. 

-j

--
Jamie Lawrence                                        address@hidden
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
    - Gov. Jesse Ventura