Rolled out earlier this week to customers, the new Profitability Report does exactly what it’s name would have you expect, it lets you check the profitability of your projects.
Where is it?
You’ll find a link to the profitability report on the Project Details Page of a project, there’s a link to “View Report” top right of the page in amongst the other reports.
The Profitability Report link on the project details page
The Actual Report
There are two views to the “Project Profitability Calculator”, one as a list of staff and one as a list of the tasks, on each view you assign an hourly rate cost to the item and an hourly rate chargeout to the item (whether it be the task or the staff member).
The system works out your actual labour cost by multiplaying your hourly rate cost & chargout by the amount of time tracked, then tells you the difference.
Example Profitability Report
Though currently quite basic, we plan to expand the profitability reporting throughout the system.
One of the most requested features by our customers is the ability to export straight to PDF across the application, we haven’t been able to offer this in the past due to licensing constraints but now with the latest release of ColdFusion (which is what ProWorkflow is written in) we have PDF features built in.
Though this has already gone out to some customers already, all of our subscription server customers will receive the feature in the next update we release.
What can I export as PDF?
We’ve added the PDF export feature to the most obvious places…
- In the tools drop-down list for invoices you’ll find the new option to “Export – PDF”
- In the tools drop-down list for quotes you’ll find the new option to “Export – PDF”
- Top right of the Calendar Page there is the option to “PDF it!”
- Top right of the Timeline Page there is the option to “PDF it!”
- Top right of all the reports you can run there is the option to “PDF it!”
- Top right of all your custom reports there is the option to “PDF it!”
- Paper Size (A4 or US Letter)
- Orientation (Landscape or Portrait)
- Margins (Left, Right, Top & Bottom in either cm or inches)
In this weeks customer spotlight we’ve talked to one of our lovely New Zealand customers Cabin Fever…
Cabin Fever is a creative design studio based in Lake Hawea, New Zealand, focussed on the production of competitive and excellent solutions for your business. Utilising the latest technology in combination with a broad business experience, we can develop original marketing tools or take something that is already good and turn it into something special.
Because of their location I couldn’t go meet them in person (which is unfortunate because Lake Hawea is a beautiful place), but we’ve kept in touch with Phone, Skype and Email.
What does your company do?
Design cool stuff
What services do you provide?
Branding, Graphic Design, Web Design, Packaging, Marketing, Advertising and Research – and top-notch cups of tea.
How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
LOW PROFILE with a varied, robust and deeply loyal client base that we have been quite selective with and they have worked hard to find us.
Take very good care of our clients and our contractors and suppliers. Respect and care is the foundation of everything we do.
What’s the back-story of your company? How/when/why was it founded?
Dave and I came to NZ in 2000 knowing we wanted to start a design company that took care of the smallest to the biggest we could sustain within our personal vision – which is to run a small company well. No desire to take over the world and grow for growths sake. We’re in it for the long haul – surround ourselves with good people to do good things. You don’t choose to live in Lake Hawea and then take over the world.
What’s your latest piece of work?
Are you joking? Latest pieces – umm – we’re really busy so there’s a bunch going out there…
If you could give other companies in your space one piece of advice, what would it be?
Run your small business well – and never loose sight of your responsibilities to your ‘people’ – have a mantra and stick hard and fast to it – not always easy to do in this fluid and changeable world but when times of trouble come you still stand up straight and tall and the good times are just that – good.
Any exciting work coming up?
Yes – always have exciting work coming up.
You’re obviously a ProWorkflow customer, why did you choose it over competitors?
Kiwi-made but for the big wide world. User friendly, hugely customizable, visionary, forward thinking, well priced – had all the SaaS bells and whistles and promised good support.
How do you use it in your company?
PWF is the quiet companion that just ‘runs’ the ship in the background. It’s the centre of the business in that we can get on with being creative while PWF gets on with being organized and dependable. It’s the HUB. Everything revolves around this one place – for a control freak clients it’s tight security with total transparency and for scatter-brained creatives it’s a guiding light when you need it. It’s Central Government with user-managed two-way doors. No smoke and mirrors.
What has ProActive software been like to deal with?
A 100% joy! A beautiful thing. Never invades and tries to be the rock star. Stands up and shouts if I want it to or just humbly makes my life, my contractors, suppliers and my clients life easy-peasy. I love making time to find new ways to tweak and refine the way it works for us. It makes us look good to all who I put it front of. In a bizarre way I wish I had a HUGE company so I could really spin it’s wheels!
What do you think of our new blog?
Great. Good idea. And just to show that I actually do read it – welcome Lara. Nice to talk to you the other day.
What would you like to see us post about?
PWF tips, Blogging tips, business refinement, new SaaS trends, Kiwi / Global companies like mine.
Any final words?
Am I your biggest fan or what! Keep on doing what you are doing. You have something special here – don’t mess with that. Like I said – it’s a beautiful thing!
Thanks so much!
A big thank-you to Georgie from Cabin Fever for letting me bug her with my questions!
Cabin Fever ProWorkflow Testimonial
If you’ve previously downloaded and installed the PWF Time Tracker then please un-install it and re-download the latest version from this page.
We’ve fixed a few things, made some tweaks and added auto-updating (it will auto-update the first time you open it), this means for any new release we make it will auto-update the app instead of having to go somewhere to download the latest version.
There are still a few bugs we are aware of as well as lots of little tweaks so we’ll continue to update it, any changes we make will be posted here so everyone is aware of them.
Have fun and Happy Halloween!
Hey everyone, just wanted to update you on the desktop time tracker. Last night we sent out a newsletter to all current customers as well as others who have added themselves to our mailing list (through previous subscriptions, code customers & trial accounts) and we’ve recieved quite a few emails with people excited about the time tracker.
We’re making some changes to the tracker today and will update you when that newer version is out so you can download it, currently on the development agenda…
- Making the widget draggable when clicking any part of it (currently only draggable in a few areas)
- Removing the link to proworkflow.com on the large image on the settings page
- Checking whether your username/password is valid upon entering it on the settings page
- Consistent naming and folder structuring (in both program files and my documents)
- Adding automatic updating (so when opening the widget if a newer version is found it will update)
- Removing the whitespace that sometimes appears at the bottom of the drop-down lists
- Automatically formatting the account URL field in settings to ensure it’s correct
- Aligning the “adding time” graphic overlay that displays when submitting time records (it’s currently a little off) as well as removing the superfluous loading bar (it’s un-neccesary because we change the submit button into a loading graphic)
- While loading in the list of tasks we’ll add some loading text
A highly requested feature was recently added to ProWorkflow, many people have maintenance or recurring billing tasks and it was a hassle to have to re-created them every week/month/year, that’s where recurring tasks come in.
If you go into a project you’ll now notice a recurring tasks module below the Project Tasks section.
The Recurring Tasks Section of the Project Details Page
This lets you set up a schedule on which tasks are created, when setting it up you can have it create tasks every X hours/days/weeks/months and end never, after a certain number of recurrences or on a specific date.
You can even set up templates on the Recurring Tasks page in Administration so that you can quickly add new recurring tasks to existing projects without the need to specify all the task’s details every time (if for example you set up a standard recurring task for every project you create).
Have you ever wanted to track some time on a task that’s in ProWorkflow without having to open up a browser and log into your account?
This is something constantly requested by many of our customers that simply want to be able to track time across different projects/tasks without the need to jump around in ProWorkflow, it pushed us to develop a time tracking widget/gadget written in the Apple Widget Engine but we encountered problems and didn’t like the limited base (OSX & Vista only).
That’s why we’ve now finished rebuilding the time tracker from the ground up in Adobe Air, while there are many benefits to using Adobe Air, the main one for us is the cross platform nature, we can write code without having to worry whether it will work on Windows/Mac/Linux properly.
Tracking time using the PWF Time Tracker
We’ve been tested it internally over the past couple of weeks and we’re now ready to release it out to customers as a beta, while we’re confident there aren’t any show-stopping bugs, if you come across anything that isn’t acting as you would expect it to then please send us an email about it.
Install Adobe Air if you don’t have it yet then download and unzip the widget installer to your desktop and double click to install it. Keep glued to the blog for any updates to the widget as it doesn’t currently auto-update, in the mean time however we have versioning so if you try to install a newer version it will just update instead of re-install.
After first installing the application you will be presented with the settings screen, simply enter in your account url and then the username/password you use for your account, from there it’s all pretty self explanatory.
If you have any questions/queries/concerns then let us know in the comments!
We’ve been steadily working away on an awesome new feature for the project details page, we’ve mentioned it previously on the blog here but I thought I’d take some time to explain it in a little more detail.
Inline Editing
This new feature we’re releasing to customers soon (once it’s out of Beta testing) will give you the ability to change information on a project without any page reloading.
It’s currently in beta testing while we work out all the kinks, but basically any field you can edit using live editing turns green and your curser changes when hovering over it…
When you double click it brings up the edit options…
When you’re done you click “Update!”, if you didn’t want to make any changes then click “Cancel”.
All of this happens without a page refresh, which should speed up the time it takes to get things done, in some cases where inline editing wouldn’t work we now just refresh that section, so for example if you add a new task we just refresh the tasks section of the page, not the whole page.
We’ll keep you updated on our progress, we plan to try this out on the project details page then slowly roll it out across the whole program, what section would you like to see it added to next?
