Creating Project Activities
If you are tracking your employee Timesheets against various Projects, you will need to create at least one Activity to categorize the times entered.
For example, if you are running a construction company, your activities may be things like Drafting, Meetings, Brick Laying, Concreting, Carpentry, Certifying etc. Basically, if you wanted to track the different types of tasks or work carried out by your employees, you will need to create several Activities to match those.
To set up Activities, go to Projects > Activities on the left hand menu, then click on the green 'Add A Project Activity' button.
This will show you the project activity maintenance screen.
The fields here are:
| Description | This is the description of the activity or task (keep it short - one or two words only if possible). |
| Cost Code | This is an optional field, the cost codes for your activities can be entered so you can reconcile the reports in HR Partner with your accounting or billing system. |
| Default Cost | You can optionally enter in a default cost for this activity so it will total up the costs of this activity in your reports. |
| Timesheet Cost Multiplier | This specifies how much markup you will charge for this activity, and will show on your reports. For example, you may have an activity that costs you $100 for you to have your employees carry it out, but you may charge that activity out at $150 to your customers, in which case you would put in 1.5 as the multiplier so the system knows how much extra the charge is vs the cost. |
| Project Activity is Active, Inactive, or Archived | This denotes whether the current activity is active (i.e. will appear on the drop-down selections when entering time), inactive (i.e. will still appear on the drop-down selections, but employees cannot select them when entering time), or archived (archiving them will hide them from timesheet activity dropdowns). |
NOTE: While you can set a default cost for this activity and use it as the cost for all your employees to keep things simple, you can actually have different costs for this activity based on the employee who is carrying it out. This lets you set different costs for the same activity depending on your employee's seniority or experience. Please see our help article on Using Project Activity Costs for more information on how to set this up.