On Oct 10, 2007, at 1:56 AM, Hans Bakker wrote:

Currently the timesheet in workeffort does not seem to have a status. Is
there a reason for that?

It would be nice if a user can indicate that his timesheet is complete
by changing the status accordingly.

Then when the timesheet is invoiced the status could be changed to
'invoiced' which would prevent the user further changing the timesheet.

Anybody any thoughts on this?

Yeah, a few thoughts:

1. helping the user know what is up with their stuff is great

2. the danger with statuses is that they can be redundant information, and we want to avoid that (for example, we do not have statuses on the OrderHeader for shipment and invoice and payment related things, those are attached to their respective entities); for Timesheets I'm not sure if they really have a status that it makes sense to manually change

3. a Timesheet is meant to contain time entries from one date/time to another date/time, for 2 weeks perhaps (to correspond with their pay period or something), so determining whether the time sheet is active or not should be determined this way

4. the billing of the related TimeEntry records may be attached to various different WorkEfforts and could be billed on different invoices for the same Timesheet, so that should be determined by looking at all invoices related to the various time entries related to it

5. it might be nice to have a manual status to denote that all time entries for the period have been entered, because it is normal that people enter time either all at once based on a paper form, or on a daily/hourly basis if they enter time right after each block of work, but even in the second scenario sometimes people forget to enter hours right away and hours could come in after the time period for the Timesheet has passed

Any other statuses anyone can think of?

BTW, it's great to see work going on in this area... I am continually frustrated with project management software. We're a month into using a commercial product right now and it's okay, but there are lots of things we can't do, it's expensive as we have to pay for each employee or client agent we want to have access the system, and in general it would be great to have something based on a more flexible data model (and one that we're familiar with and can manipulate!) so we're definitely moving toward creating a OFBiz-based system. All of our efforts are going back into OFBiz, but of course it is just progressing as we have unused resources (and competing with other OFBiz enhancement efforts we are working on like a good service-level automated test suite, and fleshing out the accounting component so to do the auto-posting and reporting so that one does not have to use a certain HPL/commercial licensed product to do that). For our early stuff, see the workeffort and projectmgr components.

-David

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