Advanced tag-based filtering (include, exclude)
Up ‘till now, when you selected BILLABLE and WEBSITE tags, you were presented with projects that were flagged with at least one of those. Now, you are able to find projects flagged by both tags, or even leave out projects with specific tags — for example, you can display only the BILLABLE projects that are not flagged by the WEBSITE tag.
Exporting reports to Excel
Clicking Export to Excel (the orange button) will now export the current report list displayed in Costlocker. If the report is longer than one page, the downloaded sheet will contain all report pages.
Bulk timesheet editing (delete, edit, move)
Now you can pick time logs and choose what you want done with them:
1.remove
2.edit within respective projects — e.g. set the same date for all selected time logs
3.move to a different project — e.g. move tracked hours to the right project
Adding everyone to a project Activity in Cost Estimate by one click
You don’t have to add people to Activities one by one anymore. Now you can add them all by clicking Add all people.
When should I add all people to the same Activity? Mostly in the case of internal projects, where you might create a single activity (e.g. Internal agenda) and add all the people in the company to it, so everyone can track their hours in this internal project.
The Weekly Timesheet
Now you can retrospectively enter tracked time per working week. It’s not necessary to enter time day by day.
Adding notes to projects
You will now find a Notes tab within each project’s detail. Enter any project notes such as links to client briefs here.
Duplicating projects now retains Activity and Project Expenses order
When creating a new project by duplicating an existing one, there will be now no change in the Activity or Task order. The order will be retained from the project being duplicated.
Keyboard shortcuts
Find the keyboard shortcut list by clicking your name in the upper right corner of the screen and selecting the Shortcuts option.
If there are any shortcuts you’d like to use, please let us know at feedback@costlocker.com.
Switching between Hourly Rates and Monthly Salaries
Now you can switch a person from an hourly rate to salary and vice versa.
Note: the change will not be reflected in the expenses of the time worked within existing projects, it will only be present in newly created projects the person will track time in.
Adding new filters in Billing Outlook (responsible people, clients, tags)
How can you utilize this? Maybe you’re working with project budgets that have not yet been approved by the client (newbiz proposals). Such projects will be reflected in the billing outlook as well.
To avoid mixing these with projects you will actually invoice, we recommend tagging the billable projects with the Billable tag. Thanks to this function, the Billing Outlook will enable you to filter out the projects flagged by the Billable tag, making sure that you see the real sum to be invoiced.
Bill ID / Description in Billing and Project expenses now expands with content
This will come handy for those of you who like to list detailed information for the person who will be making the invoice or just describe external expenses in detail.
Improved process of creating projects
We’ve removed the Responsible Person and Tags fields from the first step of project creation (Project Details) and moved them to later steps, where they now enjoy more attention.
We decided to dedicate the second step of project creation solely to tags. You can easily see what tags are being used in your company, making it easier to choose those applicable to the project you are creating.
The third step remains the same, except for the cog being replaced by the Advanced Options button which allows you to do 3 different things with Personnel Costs:
- Show Tracked Hours — this will display a new column showing tracked hours.
- Automatically move tracked hrs to estimated hrs — this will automatically take the number of worked hours from the Timesheet of the respective person and move it into the Estimated Hours field
Note: This comes handy when you invoice your work according to real hours worked.
- Lock All Activities — this will lock all Activity on the project, making it disappear from people’s Time Tracking and disabling any retrospective edits of their Timesheets.
Note: Did you know that you can skip this step if the project budget is composed of external costs only? Just press the Skip button in this step, moving on to Project Expenses.
The most prominent change is probably the relocation of the Date of purchase field after the Purchased field. The reason is simple — we found out that people don’t know whether the date pertained to the Purchased or Invoiced entry.
What’s the Date of purchase field for? It records the date when you expect to pay for an external expense. That’s important because other people with Admin rights see how much your company has to pay for all kinds of different costs each month. By filling in the Date of Purchase field, you help them adjust the company cash flow.
The last step of project creation informs you about when it appears in people’s Time Tracking.
What's Responsible person for? You can add anyone you want to these lists, enabling them to see or edit the projects — e.g. account managers. Employee role people cannot be added, because they don’t have the option to see a separate project list page.
That’s not all! There are lots of other tweaks waiting for you.
- The expenses for the tracked time entered as hourly rates are now counted within the month they were tracked
- Future income from recurring projects are now transferred to Billing Outlook
- Invoice data is now included in all exported Cost Estimates (only paying customers)
- Recurring projects are now split into Active and Inactive
- Refreshing now keeps you at the same listing page
- Existing client settings can now be duplicated (handy when copying hourly rates from one client to another)
- Negative values now accepted in Project Expenses
- API tokens are now automatically generated within the Costlocker UI
- Billing Outlook is now displayed to users with Manager roles
- Daily timesheet backtracking was improved
- New notifications when exceeding user or project limits are now automatically sent via e-mail to the account Owner
- Arrows can now be used to move up/down when selecting projects in the Timesheet
- The project ID is now shown if a company uses Auto ID by default
- The project ID is now shown in Billing Outlook
- Removed recurring projects are no more displayed in Company Performance graph
- Deactivated clients no more displayed in the select box when creating new projects
- It is now possible to remove a person with hours tracked in No Project
- Hours tracked in No Project are now included in the Workload
- The task name is now displayed in the Time Tracking input
- Backtracking Modal in the Timesheet now will not close if you click “Save and create a new entry”, enabling you to enter more records
- Project listing now optimized and loads faster
- Last Month and Last Year buttons now available when picking the time period in Timesheet
Let us show you the changes in person!
Drop us a line at support@costlocker.com and I’ll arrange a date and time to share a screen and show you everything you need to know.
If you’re interested, I can even come to your office and teach your colleagues to use Costlocker effectively.
