Streamtime offers the ability to group jobs together, set shared targets and report on the total values from all linked jobs. Rad, hey? Groups are designed to better track your retainer agreements with customers, as well as anything with a shared budget across multiple jobs such as campaign, rebrand, or even a multi-part long running project.
Watch a 3-min overview below 👇
Creating a Group
Head to your Jobs or Groups list view, and click Create group next to the Create job button.
There are two types of Groups: Repeating and Project Tracker.
Repeating Groups are designed to track retainer agreements, where you can set targets per month or quarter, and automatically track time and expenses logged against multiple jobs into monthly or quarterly buckets.
Project Tracker is a straightforward grouping, allowing you to create shared targets across all linked jobs in one large group.
Setting up your Group
To set up a Repeating Group, simply select that option, set your start date, then number and type of periods. For example, for a 12 month retainer agreement with a fixed price, you’ll set your start date then 12 months for your number of periods. For a Project Tracker, you’ll simply set start and/or end dates. These are optional.
You’ll have to set Currency for the group. Your home currency is set at the default, but if you’re working with multiple currencies, you might want to change it. This sets which currency the Group will display all data in. You’ll still be able to link any job in any currency to the group, but fr example, if your group is set to pounds, and you link a USD job, that job’s figures will be converted to pounds when displayed in the group.
Other settings are optional.
You can link any job from any company within a Group if you leave the Company field blank, but including a Company will mean only jobs for that company can be linked. Helpful to reduce manual error down the line.
Targets
You can now set shared targets for the group. All targets are optional.
Total Sell Target: This is the target for the total sell across all the linked jobs. For a Repeating Group, this is essentially your monthly budget. If you’re setting up a fixed price retainer, set the price per month or quarter here. We find this is the most used target.
You can also set a Total Cost and Total Hours target if you want to track your logged cost and hours against these goals.
For a Repeating Group, your targets will be set per month or quarter — you’ll see the aggregate total for the full length of the group automatically calculated as a hint when you set your target per period. For a Project Tracker, you’ll set totals straight up.
Tracking Options
Some groups may or may not want to include parts of the job within the data.
Including non-billable hours will mean that all hours are included in the tracking against your Total Hours target
Including unscheduled time means that all unscheduled values will be included in tracking against your sell, cost and hours targets. Useful for those more complex retainers that have specific planned time that you want to capture and have visibility over when you are checking how a retainer is going.
Lastly, including expenses will include cost and sell values when tracking against your sell and cost targets.
As a default, Streamtime will assume you wish to include expenses within your tracking only within these options.
Unscheduled Time and Dates
As with all things in Streamtime, having dates are incredibly important for getting the right data in your groups. Both Repeating Groups and Project Trackers can have dates — Repeating Groups will automatically bucket all time and expenses based on the date into each month or quarter, regardless of job dates. Project Trackers have dates as optional — if you set start and end dates, only data that falls within the range will be tracked.
With Planned Time, there can be some ambiguous interactions between item dates and group dates, if you haven’t set both start and end dates in each situation. Where this happens, Streamtime will make a best guess as to whether or not to include or exclude data. The upshot? Include dates on your items and groups if you want certainty on what unscheduled time data will be included.
Watch a quick video on how dates affect Group data in Project Trackers here 👇
Linking Jobs
Creating your Group now will take you to the Group page. Now, link jobs to your group or create them quickly to auto-link them.
Jobs can only be linked to one group at a time, so some jobs within the dropdown will be disabled. You can link multiple jobs at once, and toggle include archived on or off.
You can also create jobs directly into the group by clicking Create Job. You can choose to Create and Plan directly after you create, or simply click Create Job to stay within your Group page.
Viewing your data
Once you’ve linked jobs, Streamtime will do some magical whirring in the background, and display aggregated data based on the dates on each time entry and expense logged.
Data synchronisation — patience, young padawan
As Streamtime will be automatically pulling data from one place to another in order to show you what you need to know, your data may not be automatically synced. In most cases, your data will refresh within 30 seconds — but in particularly busy times, it might take a little longer.
Understanding the chart
On a Project Tracker, you'll see a bar chart showing what jobs are accounting for the most or least values in the target tracking. With a Repeating Group, you'll be able to see a breakdown of your time and expenses contributing to the Total Sell, Cost and Hours. Bonus if you have targets set: you'll see what remains of your monthly target and if you've gone over.
Your chart will show you data based on what you've set up in your tracking options. By default, you'll only see Used and Scheduled Time that makes up your total sell. It's useful to be able to differentiate between what's Used and what's not yet logged, so if your scheduled time takes you over your target, you can make some changes to avoid that. Including Unscheduled Time will also show the remainder of what your jobs have Planned in your targets.
Exporting your data
You can export your group data via CSV. Streamtime offers a few of levels of detail for you to drill down into, depending on what you need your data for.
Your CSV will download grouped by month if you’re in View by Month mode, or by job if in View by Job.
You can then select between top level group totals or secondary group totals. Top level totals will give you the data for Total Sell, Total Cost and Total Hours; whereas secondary data will also give you separate columns for the breakdowns time and expenses within those totals.
Selecting formatting will provide figures as currency or hours/minutes.
I want more!
We'll be publishing some new resources on how to manage specific setups shortly — in the meantime, have a play!
Questions? Comments?
As with all of our feature updates, we're keen to hear what you think. Reach out via help@streamtime.net with your thoughts or questions.