Back to the subject of timesheets? :-) Thanks David for you extensive answer. I agree with you that we should not enter status fields everywhere; a reference should block the data from updating.
We do however need a flag where the user indicates that the timesheet is complete and that it can be 'processed'. This processing should create a link to the invoice, via workeffort if required, which should block the timesheet-entry from update. Perhaps we need later a report which will show the timesheet entries which were not processed....... I will propose the customer this solution. Regards, Hans On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 14:34 -0600, David E Jones wrote: > 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 > -- http://Antwebsystems.com : OFBiz Quality support for competitive rates.
