Track Time Spent on Tasks

In this clip I’ll show you how you can use Elementool to track the time that team members spend on issues.
Tracking time enables you to view the progress of the project and make changes to the project plan if needed.
It is also useful for billing in case clients pay you by the hours you spent developing their projects.

To start using this feature, you should have the Issue Tracking and Scheduling services, because time tracking is done using the integration between Issue Tracking and Scheduling.

The first step is to submit the issues to the Issue Tracking account and assigned them to your team members.
I’m guessing you already know how to do that. If not, please see the Issue Tracking User Manual clip for instructions.

The next step is to assign the issues to a project or projects in the Scheduling service.
To do that, please follow these steps:
• Switch to Scheduling.
• Click on Edit Schedule
• Click on the Add button to add a project. You can assign issues to one or more projects.
• Now that the project is defined, click on the Add button to add the issues to the project.

After the issues have been added to the project, the team members can use the Scheduling section on the Issue form to submit the time that they spend on the issues.

To submit the time spent on an issue, please follow these steps:
• Open the issue
• Scroll down to the Scheduling section
• Submit the date and time that you spent working on the issue.
• Click on the Update

If we go back to Scheduling and look at the Gantt chart, we can see the project plan displayed in light blue and the actual time that the team spent on the issues in dark blue. This gives us a quick view of the project progress.

If you still don’t have an Elementool account, click on the ‘Sign Up Now’ button below to open a free trial account.

How to Send Daily Reports

Hi, it’s Allison again.
Today I would like to present two new features that we added to the reporting section:

• The option to define the view type of the Quick Reports.
• The option to automatically send a daily report by email.

The reports offer 5 view types:
• Normal – this is the standard report type that is display on your browser.
• Dynamic – The Dynamic view type enables you to make changes to the issues directly on the report. This allows you to update multiple issues in a single update instead of opening each issue separately.
• Print View – this is a printer friendly view of the report, that is useful in case you wish to print the report.
• Excel CSV and Excel HTML – these two view types enable you to export the report to an Excel file. Each offers a different Excel formatting option and you can choose the one that suits you the most.

We added an option to define the view type of each Quick Report. It saves you the trouble of defining how you would like the report to look like when running it.

Please follow these steps to change the view type of an existing report:
• Select the report from the Quick Report list.
• Click on Edit Selected Report.
• The Quick Report setup window will open.
• Click on the Step 3 button and the on the Step 4 button to go to the Step 4 page.
• On this page define the View Type and click on Save.

The Send Daily Report option enables you to send reports on a daily basis to other Elementool users or to external people who don’t use Elementool.
It is an easy way to send updates about tasks and issues that you have in your account.

For example: every morning you can send a report of all the open issues in your account, to inform people of the tasks that need to be taken care of.

To setup an automatic daily report, please follow these simple steps:
1. Go to the report page by clicking on Issue Report.
2. Select a report from the Quick Report list.
3. Click on Send Selected Report.
4. Define the recipients by selecting Elementool users or by typing email addresses of external people.
5. Check off the ‘Send report automatically daily’ check box.
6. Select the time when you would like to report to be sent daily.
7. Click on Send.

Very easy.

We plan to release more new features in the near future.
Stay tuned!