Sage Coretime Blog

Without proper employee training, appreciation and understanding of a project management system, the system will be underutilised, cause employee frustration and be a drain on an organisation’s resources.

A strong organisation and management system are important to any business, no matter what the size and no matter what the industry. If employees are not given proper training in new systems, they can quickly end up being unused and left unattended by staff across your business making it a waste of your time and money setting one up. It can also be frustrating for employees who are unable to adapt to new systems when they have not been given proper training and being forced to work them into their schedules.

When looking at implementing any new system into the workplace it is important to asses which project management systems will work best for you. You must ensure that these are flexible enough to meet the needs of your business, while at the same time being easily implementable for your staff. Once you know what package you want, after examining your options, it’s highly beneficial to provide staff with a walk through of every step and every facet of your chosen system. While some things may seem obvious, many staff may have differing levels of technical abilities and it’s important to make sure that even the basics of your project management system are explained. Easing staff into new routines is also an important step. Many people work off their own systems for managing their time and their day so it’s a good idea to make sure that people move their resourcing over to your new system while not dropping their own, as this allows people to build up some familiarity with any new piece of software. While you might want to let people ease into any new management system, it’s a good idea to set a deadline; this means that you allow people a period to adapt to their new project management software while giving a cut-off point for your business to move to a more efficient project management system.

Untrained staff will only end up not using systems which you have bought, many companies which introduce new project management systems without proper training and change-over periods often encounter difficulties as staff find that their own systems work better and that learning to use any new management software takes up too much time and may not be done correctly which can lead to further problems down the line. Many project management systems require time and effort, in order to choose the right one for your business, by not ensuring your staff are properly trained you also end up taking your time and money into something which won’t be used.

Sage Coretime is an easy to use solution to Project Management for your company, providing comprehensive and user friendly software which allows you to keep track of your staff and projects.

Well the new version (2.4.0.120) is finally available. It was (for us) a long time coming due to calls from other departments for developer expertise which (according to those departments) would be so limited as to have no affect on your timelines.

So, what was the aim of this release – as with most major releases this covers a number of areas

1.  Bug and Issue fixes – while not detailed here the full list is available on www.coretime.com – this being those issues found by us or our clients.
2. Enhancement requests – generally these come from our clients and address specific issues they have and our analysis team review with them and similar client to find the best way to address the issue
3. Feature requests – these are generally driven by either clients in new sectors for us or by research into new sectors to allow a better fit into those sectors. In this instance work has been done to expand the international scope of the product amongst others.

However, back to the key features of this release as summarised below:-

General

1. Option to select your start day of the week.
2.  Currency – allow for those currencies where two decimal points is not the norm.

Time Entry

1. Scroll on piano time bar will fill in the gaps on the piano bar as separate time entries. This makes it easy to fill in the gaps when entering time for a day
2.  Can now set the system to not permit time entry after the current year end date.

Project Management

1. Default Budget Type – All new Projects created have the specified budget type set a the default budget type.
2. Ability to flag a Project so as expenses cannot be raised against it.
3. Default Projects – a facility to add a new project against all clients (or a subset of clients) at once.

Invoicing / Statements

1. New Tag All button to enable quick Invoicing.
2. Bill Texts – New Unit Price Formula to allow for use of formula (i.e. * 12 ) when raising Invoices with Bill Texts
3. New Copy Invoice Functionality – Setup using system Option Use Copy invoice in WIP Screen – When enabled have option to save an Invoice including Bill Text details as a Favourite Invoice – Then you can re-use this Invoice template when raising new Invoices.
4. Auto Fee Outlay – The System Option Use Auto Fee Outlay must be enabled – Under Client Utilities the Outlay for Fees screen now has By Percentage option – So if an Invoice is raised this will add an outlay invoice line with a value calculated as a percentage of the total amount – So if the Percentage is 10% and the total invoice amount is 100, then the added Outlay fee line with be for 10.
5. When running the statements, multi project payments should appear as one line when the ‘Show Client Only’ option is ticked.
6. With Statement MS Word Template – documented details on option to copy main table details onto extra page / remittance slip – Setup of this is documented in Statement Word Template Detail.doc

Reports

1. Day Book Reports – New Show Client Vat No option allows Client Vat No to show on Day Books Reports.
2. Aged WIP report – New Include WIP values above option – This allows reports to be run for a Wip balance greater than a certain value (i.e. > 500).
3. Project Overview Report – allows for high level review of key data.
4. Overtime Report – Reporting specifically on the overtime worked by employees.
5. Client period Report – Time spent on a client for a selected period.
6. Portfolio Report – another high level project report highlighting key data

Staff Planner

1. Staff Planner now shows ‘+’ if dealing with multiple entries on the same day of a display line.
2. New option to add a Planner Task to All Employees, or All in a Department, or all in a Position.
3. Filtering of views by analysis group.
4. Enhanced checks on new entries.

Links

1. Sage 50 link – When bringing in Purchase Invoice detail from Sage 50 if there is a specific Cost Code it will match that against relevant Expense Type in Coretime rather than the default Expense accounts Journal.
2. Export For Vision – New Employee Analysis Grouping report selection option on the report.
3. Accounts production – Outlay items will now include costs.
4. Accounts Production – allow for the bringing over of the customer name on the invoice.

For more details on how to upgrade, please contact our support team.

Sage Coretime Support pages have been updated to include a Knowledge Base containing useful articles on how to use Sage Coretime.

 To find out more go to support.coretime.com