This guide has been created for system administrators.
Overview
By using the activities feature within time submissions, companies can record time spent across the business on a specific long-term project, travelling or training as an example. Activities is best used to monitor long-term or reoccurring business-related actions. By using the edays system, administrators can create and define their own list of activities they wish to monitor. They can then choose if this time spent can be recorded by staff or authorisers and administrators only. Activities are similar to booking leave in the sense that the edays system records the amount of time a user’s normal shift is affected but, in this instance, it does not reduce their entitlement.
This feature benefits companies who are looking to see where time is being spent across the business at a glance as well as those looking to run detailed reports, which can be specified down to the minute.
There are a number of benefits involved with monitoring business activities, such as reviewing the effectiveness of time spent or identifying the need for the greater resources.
Step-by-step Guide
- Navigate to Global -> Time submission settings -> Manage activities
- Add New to Create - Enter Activity Information
- Name – this appears in the front end, in reports and should specify the activity exactly.
- Description – extra detail about the activity. The description only appears in the admin panel.
- Sort index - determines the order in which activities appear in the dropdown.
- Active – when unticked, an activity is removed from all possible selections.
- Once an activity is set up, it can be enabled at a global level by selecting it from the Activities list. The list can also be overridden at the template or user level.
- Activities can be deleted if they are neither enabled on any global, template or user level, or in use in a timesheet anywhere. Therefore, you will normally want to make activities inactive rather than deleting them.
- This list is ordered with Active first, for ease of editing.
Example Configuration
Pallas Accountants is an accountancy firm based in northwest England. They have three small sites located in Manchester, Liverpool and Blackpool and have 55 staff. Currently, to monitor customer meetings and time spent collating customer reports, they collect information from staff calendars to manually calculate time spent. This is often inaccurate but is significant use of their time.
In the image below you can see that Customer Meetings and Customer Reports have been enabled within the activities section at the bottom of the time submissions settings page.
Pallas Accountants create two activities ‘Customer Meeting’ and ‘Customer Reports’ in the edays system and users record time spent to complete each activity. After a month of using the activity feature, they can see that time spent on customer meetings is on average higher for staff in Manchester, but they spent less time on average creating custom reports. Smith & Jones use this report to upskill staff in Liverpool & Blackpool to gain better customer insights to reduce the time spent on generating their reports.
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