As a company with employees across the land, Hibou uses the magic of Odoo's Planning and Project applications, along with Timesheets for our Accounting and Payroll purposes. Our employees enter in their time spent on individual project tasks consuming the task's planned time. This translates into their hourly rate for their work to be billed to clients and/or later added up for their paychecks. Everyone differs, so some folks enter in time as they go about their day and some enter everything in before signing off for the evening. Setting up Planning and Timesheets could be your time saver, too!
While we do use the Project application for our overall documentation and categorizing conduit for our work, we've moved to utilizing the Planning application in our day-to-day. This does require enabling the Planning option in the Project configuration. We have set "Planners" to whom we submit our "To-Do's", and they in turn slot time during the week for us to focus on those tasks. With the Planning application, you can absolutely set these slots for specific timeframes and give your employees a more structured schedule if that's how you roll. We use this more as a "I have A, B, and C on my list today. I think I'm going to work on A for the first couple hours of my day, then B, and I'll get C going after lunch." However, we can mix this around or even jump into something not planned if time allows or if it requires immediate attention.
When shifts or tasks have been entered, the page looks similar to the example above. These can be dragged and dropped, reassigned, edited, or canceled as needed. As you can see, we have a clear view of the employees' scheduled shifts. Those marked with a red corner have conflicting shifts assigned at the same time. At the top are open shifts, which the employees can select and choose to take on. When someone is ready to enter in a timesheet for a task, we can can get to it one of two ways. If we select the planning slot the task is in from our Planning application, a modal window appears such as we see here:
By selecting the external link next to the task listed in the window, we land on the task within the Project application... which is another way we can access our tasks to update our timesheets.
By going into the Project application and checking under our tasks, we can select the one we're looking to update and be directed to the same page. From there, if we select "Add a Line" we are able to enter a description of what we have been working on, add some notes and mark how long we have spent on it.
This will give us and our administration an idea of how we spend our days, what tasks might require more time, and let them know if we require assistance or further review on our work. Aside from keeping things organized and visible, it also instills that, with the freedom of choosing how we spend our workday, we have to spend it wisely and responsibly. As I mentioned... we're all adults here. If using these techniques in your own company sounds like something you'd like to give a try, check out our contact form at the bottom of this page. We can walk you through the set up and get your team ready to go!