1. Introduction (0:00 – 0:13)
Hi everyone! This is Yanick for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’. In this episode, we’re going to be looking at how we can prevent budget disaster before it happens.

2. Importance of Budget Control (0:14 – 0:35)
So as a project manager, I don’t want to go over budget. Budget is precious. I want to keep it in my project. I want to be notified and alarmed if ever I’m going to go over budget and if it’s the case, I want to be able to easily dig in and find the root cause. And at that point, I want to be able to stop everything or course correct, so I can deliver my project successfully.

3. Introduction to Klient (0:36 – 0:50)
So with this in mind, let’s go see it in Klient.

4. Daily Routine of a Project Manager (0:51 – 1:10)
So as a Project Manager, at the beginning of my day, after looking at my release note in Klient, I would go in my ‘Global Workspace’ where I would see a detailed list of my projects with the different attributes and surprise, surprise here! We do have some red showing. It wasn’t the case yesterday.

5. Identifying At-Risk Projects (1:11 – 1:30)
So, we have this project that has become at risk and we definitely need to take care of it. As a Project Manager, I want to be able to simply investigate.

6. Investigating the Problem (1:31 – 2:00)
So let me go in my Workspace, switch my preset to another set of columns where I’m going to be able to see in detail that this is the main problem we have, the design phase of this project, where we had 29 hours estimated, 21 hours have been logged so far, and only 25% has been completed. And we can see with this specific field, and this is the key here, is that 84 hours is estimated at completion if we keep this course.

7. Course Correcting the Project (2:01 – 2:50)
So as a good Project Manager, I want to be able to go in and course correct like we said. So let me open up that specific task and go see its details of what it entails. So a design task could always be tricky. In this case, we’re building a customer community page for our customer. So, there’s a design that’s been proposed. We can see the team, you have myself and also have Jim and Ben Gray, my Developer and our Business Analyst. And this is the main problem here is that if we stay on course at 25% complete, with that number of hours logged and the estimation, we’re going to end up at 84 hours. So this is unacceptable.

8. Resolving the Issue (2:51 – 3:30)
So let me go in and see more of the details. On the left side, I can see my checklist, where only one out of four items, for 25%, has been complete. So we need to tackle the other tasks if we want to get unblocked and unstuck. And we can really go in the details here and because everything lives under one roof, one roof, one system, all that communication is also following and we can see that there’s been a lot of communication between the Developer and the Business Analyst not agreeing on the design. This happens quite often. This is how you go over budget.

9. Making the Final Decision (3:31 – 4:00)
So now I can simply and easily stop this madness and say ‘I got it, first design is good enough!’ and then communicating with my team, we can unstuck this task and I’ll handle Jim and the way he handled this task in his one-on-one. But now I can come back here in my checklist, define that the ‘Develop design’ is good. As a Project Manager, I do approve that design. And just like that my task is now completed.

10. Conclusion (4:01 – 4:18)
And then the number of hours… I’ve ended up at 21 hours. So we are even under budget because I’ve been able to see and interact very rapidly with my team to prevent that budget overrun. So at the end, with Klient as a Project Manager, I never go over budget because I always find out before it happens and I can then course correct effectively. So with this, I say thank you and see you in another episode!

0:01 – Introduction
Greetings everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’. Today, on how we can ensure project accuracy with contextual timesheets approval. First, not doing an approval process for your timesheets will generate some challenges. It will reduce the accountability of your team against the information they put on the projects. It will also reduce the accuracy of your project remaining budget so that you can have project overruns or poor reactions to changes on the project. It will obviously potentially generate errors on the billing, which could cause disputes or dissatisfaction of your customer, and ultimately reduce the efficiency of your operational process with back and forth between Project Management and the accounting part of your projects.

0:56 – Best Practices
So just to name a few best practices here related on that topic, which would help in using Klient is the real-time project tracking. Log time as often as possible, daily, worst case weekly, so that your information is as valid as possible. Launching your timesheets within an automated approval process, which can be contextualized based on types of projects and other business rules. Including your team members to validate the data, so the right person at the right time. If the PM is the best person, then we have the PM. If in some other context it should be Functional Manager, have that person validate the information. Operate within an integrated system so that you use the same information for project management, time tracking, and eventually invoicing. And as for any other processes, keeping an eye on dashboards is always a big plus.

1:58 – Timesheet Approval Process
So without further ado, let’s show how to achieve a few of those items within the Klient system. This all starts on My Timesheet where a consultant will be able to commit on their time, hitting the Submit button. Once this is clicked, it will launch into the approval processes as set by the system admin. The approval process can be easily configured by reaching Setup, and then getting on the configuration side into the Approval Processes section. That approval process will define what are the conditions, we could think of having several approvals for maybe billable projects, where timesheets might go to a Project Manager, then to accounting. Or a non-billable project, let’s say for training or any overheads that you might want to track so that it goes to Functional Managers in those cases. Each of the actions, approval, rejections, or recall, can be set to have email templates to automatically notify users that an action is required from them.

3:00 – Mass Approval UI
As an approver, I will have mass approval UI to help me look over all timesheets that are pending my action. I can look at those timesheets grouped by projects, project resource, role, or even account, based on the context that I’m in. The high-level information will provide more information of what I’m looking at. I can also eventually look into further details, hovering over this to look into all the comments or digging into a timesheet for further details. Once I’m done, I can mass select any timesheets that are okay and ready for the next step, and then I can simply select what is the status and then hitting Submit. This will launch the next step of our approval if it’s a multi-step approach.

3:43 – Dashboards and Reports
As for any other processes within our business, we should leverage the dashboards and reports to review the information based on different segmentations or grouping that we want to have. That information can eventually be used so that we create personalized flows to notify our users, if a timesheet is not submitted for example. We can also use the reports to have a global overview of all our comments or time entered, so that it’s another tool that can support the timesheet approval process.

4:14 – Conclusion
All in all, Klient will help you improve the quality of information by easily setting up contextualize approval process. Simplifying the review of your timesheets with the mass timesheet approval UI. Using the available data for personalized notification. Improve the data quality and review using the dashboards and reports. And ultimately reducing your invoicing cycle. Hopefully, you’ve seen a few tricks that will help in your business. Let us know if you have any questions or comments. Always a pleasure to help! Reach out to [email protected], it’ll be a pleasure. Thanks, have a great day!

Introduction (0:00 – 0:14)
Greetings, everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’. Today a quick tip related to a question from Billy Blue on “How can we highlight key related records on a Klient page?” and we’ll use dynamic related lists for this.

Overview of Page Layout (0:14 – 0:37)
So here’s how my page layout looks like on my environment here where I have some subtabs showing open milestones and uninvoiced items. This case, maybe when we’re logging onto a project, we just want to have a quick snippet on key items.

Dynamic Lists for Open Milestones (0:37 – 0:54)
Open milestones might be one. So in a big project, you might have several milestones. You want to see what’s still there, put some highlights and focus on the milestones. I could have a dynamic list here, showing just open milestones right on my page layout.

Dynamic Lists for Uninvoiced Items (0:54 – 1:25)
Same concept here with ‘Uninvoiced’, where if I’m a project type ‘time and material’, then I have a certain number of lists showing, ‘Timesheet Splits’ for billable items, maybe my ‘Milestone Payments’ that I could have for specific deliverables or in some other cases, ‘Billing lines’ or ‘Expense lines’ if I have any.

Accessing Setup and Page Layout Configuration (1:25 – 1:43)
So to do just that, we just reach out to the ‘Setup’ and go into the ‘Edit Page’. This brings you on the backside of your page layout itself, where you can configure that. So if you’re a system admin, you should be able to do that.

Configuring Dynamic Related Lists (1:43 – 2:16)
So here I have my tabs that we were seeing earlier. So let me reach the ‘Uninvoiced’ one. So to add those lists, we simply need to drag the ‘Dynamic Related Lists – Single’ and then drop in on our page. And then the configuration starts for each of those lists.

Setting Up Timesheet Split List (2:16 – 2:42)
So here, how I’ve set up the timesheet split ones, where we select the related lists that we want to see, so any objects that are related to our Klient project record that we’re looking at right now. What is the label that we want to use? And then going lower here we have the related list fields that we want to see.

Defining Columns and Filters (2:42 – 3:14)
So what are the columns that you actually want to show in your related list. So you can go and select any fields from the Klient task and the timesheet split sorry, that we have here. Then we can sort by some fields and define on the order. And then we get into the filters. So in this case, for this timesheet split list, I’m showing only ‘Uninvoiced’. So where ‘Invoiced’ checkbox is equal to false. And then where the ‘Billable’ checkbox is equal to true. So only those timesheets split records are going to show here.

Additional Filter Examples (3:14 – 3:45)
We understand that it would be the same concept if we were to say only ‘Open milestones’, so where milestones equal true, and then where ‘Status’ is not equal to ‘Completed’. So you can think of several types of filters here.

Setting Component Visibility (3:45 – End)
And then the other neat aspect here is the set component visibility. So maybe timesheet split, we don’t necessarily want to have it on every type of project. Maybe we want to see it only if it’s a time & expense type of project. So we can set, based on the record that we’re looking at, so in this case the Klient project record, we can define what conditions would make this list view visible. So this is how we can use the dynamic related lists to show specific items or highlight key related records on our page layout. Obviously that can be used on any types of records. We could also find lots of other examples, maybe even on invoices or your tasks themselves. Hopefully that helps. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected] to continue the discussion on this. Thanks! Have a great day!

0:00 – Introduction to Exception Reports
Hey, greetings everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’! I want to talk about exception reports now and how they are a key tool to maintain data quality in your system. So we do have access to a myriad, a notion of information these days. We are bringing everything on the same system which is great, but how do we keep focus and how do we have access to key information that needs to be addressed right now? How do we identify process blockers or things that might be an issue, so that we have a process that runs smoothly and we address or tackle potential problems with our customer before they become one? And then how do we provide visibility on critical tasks that need to be addressed? So these are just a few challenges obviously, that can eventually be addressed using exception reports.

0:52 – What are Exception Reports?
And what do I mean by the exception report? It’s really just a report that focuses on an hour type of things. In this case I’m showing the example of billable milestones. So you’re doing project management, you have some deliverables. There might be a gate or a key date that needs to be tracked, a project go-live, or some delivery approval that are attached to a payment. So here I’m looking at only milestones from our project. So it’s a subset of tasks within all my tasks that I have in my system. And I’m looking only at tasks that are overdue. So my due date is in the past, so something needs to be done about that. Or if my status is not complete. So if they are in the past and not completed, either I need to change the date and reschedule and address the issue with the customer or whomever is dependent on that milestone to be completed. Or I update the status because it was actually completed, but it was not marked as such. So that’s an exception report.

1:59 – Benefits of Exception Reports
Looking across all my information just to find some key information that we need to address, that we might have an issue with, have a challenge managing it. So in this case, we can use or review that information obviously as a report itself. Another neat thing that I like to do often is to use the ‘Subscribe’ button on reports in Salesforce where you can have that scheduled, sent over to you. It could be sent only if there are actually records in there, so you just send me the report if there are records, if there is more than one. So that also serves as an alert. I love that feature, especially when we’re doing a pilot or trying to find solutions to address a process before we fully automate things. I like to use the ‘Subscribe’ on reports, to address that. And obviously, those exception reports should be used and leveraged also on dashboards. So if you want to provide that visibility and generate accountability to people, you should expose that and review them as a team.

2:52 – Practical Example: Pre-Invoicing
So here the example is pre-invoicing, so finance, accounting. They’re looking into generating new invoices, they want to make sure that everything is up to date. Overdue billable milestones is going to be key for them. So they will want to look with their PMs and make sure that there are actions taken to correct the information. So reschedule or mark as complete so that we can go on the rest of the process.

3:39 – Summary of Benefits
Benefits, obviously, just to summarize my thoughts here: We want to create team alignment and visibility by using those exception reports, bringing focus to people so that we stimulate accountability. People will tend to make sure that they maintain their information. If we keep on looking into those exception reports in the team meetings, it’s going to build some habits, doing so.

4:02 – Conclusion
So hopefully you find some value into this trick here, using exception reports to have better visibility over your information. Thanks, you have a great day!

Introduction (0:00 – 0:13)
Hey, greeting everyone! Dominic for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’ with a customer question today on how we can prevent time entry on specific tasks.

Customer Query (0:13 – 0:17)
So thank you, Rose, for your question. I will go a bit broader than the specific task here to show you all the ways we can affect time entry.

Project Settings (0:17 – 0:44)
I’m starting on a project where I want to show you the ‘Close Time Entry’ field. First, if you are on a V48 or earlier version, you should have that available. If not, it’s most likely just not showing on your page layout. Reach out to a system admin so they can bring it back as visible.

Close Time Entry Field (0:45 – 1:55)
Here, ‘Close Time Entry’ on a project, if enabled, means that anyone from the project will not be able to log hours on that project. This can be used in the context where the project is not completed, it might be on hold for some reason, financial issues, or whatever. You want to prevent your team from logging hours on there. You might want to use that temporarily so you can control the hours being entered against that project. It is also available if you reach a Klient task where that same name field ‘Close Time Entry’ is available.

Preventing Time Entry on Klient Tasks (1:56 – 2:59)
Same kind of use, this will prevent logging hours on a specific task. You might also want to enable that temporarily or permanently depending on the need. Another way to prevent time entry is by using resource availability. Resources can be set to unavailable, meaning they won’t be able to log hours during the time they are unavailable.

Timesheet Custom Settings (3:00 – 3:36)
Next, you have timesheet custom settings. First one is ‘Disable Completed Tasks’, which states it by the name, which is if you have the task completed, it will not be available in your timesheet. The other one is ‘Display Assigned Tasks Only’, where if you want to be very prescriptive on how people are logging their hours, if you enable this, the resource would only see assigned task in their dropdown.

Custom Validation Rules (3:37 – 4:15)
And the last one I’m listing here, custom validation rules. If you want to affect time entry, you can add custom validation rules on timesheet detail object. If you have a different use case, that’s also another option, to show an error message on a line that maybe you don’t want hours to be logged for some reason. Exceeded number of estimated hours or some other business rules you might have.

Conclusion (4:16 – 4:29)
So hopefully one of those five ways will suit your need. If you have any questions, comments, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. It will be a pleasure to support you and help you in finding the right method to apply in your context. Thanks, have a great day!