This article is written for our Groups feature, currently in Beta and active only for a group of customers. Find out more here. If you're interested in the feature, reach out to our Customer Success team via help@streamtime.net.
✋ I'm not seeing some data from my Job that I expect to see in my Group. Why?
The first point of call is to check your dates and Item statuses. Depending on how you've set up your jobs and group dates, you might have some data that we exclude.
Here's a runthrough of a few things to check if your data isn't showing what you expect!
Logged and Scheduled To Do's and Expenses use the date logged, scheduled or the date of the expense. (Pretty straightforward).
Have you got To Do's or Expenses outside of your Group dates? They will not be included in the Group.
Unscheduled Time is calculated by the Planned hours, less anything logged or scheduled, then spread evenly across the time remaining within the item dates, for items in play or paused.
Have you got no item dates, but there are both dates on a Project Tracker group? We'll then spread the time across the whole period.
Have you got no item dates, and there's only one date (start or end) on your Project Tracker group? Streamtime doesn't have enough information to know where to put the unscheduled time, so we have to disregard it from the Group data.
Are any of your items complete? Completed Items are excluded from unscheduled time calculations. Streamtime assumes that if an item is complete, the Group no longer needs to account for unused time.
The Upshot: Dates are King 👑 (or Queen!) Where you want the most certainty, set dates on your items and your Group. Then Streamtime has the most information to be able to attribute Unscheduled time properly. Item dates won't affect any To Do's or expenses.
✋ Why doesn't my data sync immediately?
You can imagine that grabbing all the data from multiple jobs means a lot of grunt work in the back end. Streamtime therefore queues up the work similar to batch actions — your data will regularly sync through the day. The good news is, you can navigate away from the page while it ticks away in the background — which you wouldn't be able to do if Streamtime processed everything, everywhere, all at once. You can see when your data was last updated in the top right corner.
✋ Should I include unscheduled time in my tracking options, or not?
This depends on how you want to forecast time that you plan to spend, but might not have in the Schedule yet.
If you want to account for all your planned time, then include unscheduled time.
This means that any planned hours on items will be included in the Group's reported Total Sell Cost, and Hours. We can think of this as "all expected time". We've planned for it, so we expect to log it.
If you only want to account for logged and scheduled To Do's, then keep this unchecked.
This means we'll only aggregate Used and Scheduled Time in the Group's reported Total Sell, Cost and Hours. We can think of this as "all locked-in time". It's locked in by nature of the fact that To Do's have been created.
An Example: Say you have planned to spend 20hours at $150 hourly rate. You've logged 10hours, there are 4h in the schedule, and 6h left of Planned.
Including Unscheduled Time means that the Group will report the full 20hours and $3,000 against the target, if the item is not Complete. The tooltip and graph breaks down this figure.
Excluding Unscheduled Time means that the Group will report 14h and $2,100 against the targets.
✋ Why would I set a Total Cost Target?
Streamtime doesn't have the concept of a Cost Budget or Target on Jobs, so we're aware this is new. You might have a set amount of profit that you want to see from a Group. You could set a Cost Target to burn up to and see how your profit is going. You could also set a Group up just to track costs of internal work that you might not bill. We'd love your feedback on how this target type works (or doesn't work) for you in particular.
✋ What does Closing a Group do? Does it affect my linked Jobs?
Closing a Group doesn't affect your jobs, it simply stops you from being able to link new jobs. It's also a workflow status so you can more easily filter which groups are open and closed in the list view.
✋ Our retainer agreements have a rollover of target if we haven't used it all up.
We're aware some retainers allow for rollover of unused time or budget when the time period ends — and while this functionality isn't yet possible within Groups, you are able to see the over- and under-burn through the budget via the graph.
We're working on it! Please do tell us if this is something you want to help prioritise our improvement ideas bank.
✋ I want to invoice my Group. Can I?
We're aware that this might be something that our customers want. Since everything starts with a Job in Streamtime, invoicing a Group would represent a big fundamental change, both technically and throughout our product. Invoices still belong to Jobs, but they're encased in Groups. Depending on your future Reporting requirements, you may want to invoice individual jobs, or you may want to house all invoicing via a job within the group to specifically handle quoting and invoicing.