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Project template example

Each type of project is categorized by project template in Time. A type of project can correlate with a service provided by your firm. You can predefine budgets, deadlines, issues and assignments in your project templates. Additionally, you can define subproject templates to further organize the areas of your project.

As an example, assume your firm provides Audit Services - you can create a project template to define common details related to Audit Services, such as:

General Information - specify engagement details for audit services such as staff responsible for audit engagements, critical dates, software solutions, and other notes typically relevant for this service.
Budget Information - provide an average or ceiling amount for hours and dollar amounts that are typically committed for clients who receive this service.
Staff Assignments - assign staff members who typically work on audit engagements.
Clients - assign clients who receive audit services to create customizable client projects.

Furthermore, you can define subproject templates for the audit project template:

Planning and Risk Assessment
Field Work (Risk Response)
Wrap Up (Completing and Reporting)

In this example subproject templates align with the firm's workflow during an audit engagement and define important high-level tasks that must be considered during each stage of the engagement.

Issues

Issues are tasks for a given project or subproject. At the template level issues can be flexible items that are typically performed by your firm. Meanwhile, at the client level issues can be more granular and consist of many smaller tasks based on the client.

For instance in our Audit Services example, the following kinds of issues can be defined for each subproject template:

Planning and Risk Assessment	Field Work (Risk Response)	Wrap Up (Completing and Reporting)
Client Acceptance Overall Audit Strategy Materiality Risk reports	Update to Overall Audit Strategy Audit Response Substantive Procedures Audit Procedures	Evaluate Audit evidence Audit findings Materiality Financial statement and Audit Report Review

Each issue can be clarified and refined at the client level to reflect the needs of each client. At the client level other details such as deadlines, detailed budgets and staff assignments can be specified to address a specific client.

Staff Assignment

You can assign staff members to project templates and to client projects. Assigning staff to project templates provides a set of potential staff members who are qualified for the services outlined in the template.

From client projects you can assign additional staff members as necessary and directly assign the selected staff to issues.

Scheduler

To manage the various issues and staff assignments across your projects you can use Time's scheduling tool to view and update work assigned across your firm. Filter the scheduling calendar based on weekly or monthly periods to manage workloads and track work progression for clients, staff, projects and subprojects.

Client Assignments

When you are satisfied with the scope of the project template you can assign clients to a project template. Assigning clients to the project template creates customizable projects and subprojects (if applicable) for the client. Each assigned client is created with the default set of budgets, dates, staffs and roll forward options that are specified in the project template.

Roll Forward

Roll forward enables you to expedite the process of creating projects and setting their default attributes for subsequent project cycles. Use this feature to automatically create project templates or client projects for the next project cycle based off of existing project templates and client projects.