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First steps within Forecastify

How much usable information we can show you the very first time you log in, depends on how well you have filled out everything during the Onboarding process. In the following steps we will show you what you can do to get the most out of Forecastify

Bulletpoint cheat sheet​

  • In order to be able to add Employees, you need to have your User Attributes in order, so start with those
  • Import your employees
  • In order for any calculations to take place, you need at least one cost tier set, and a general cost level set
  • Add tiers to your employees
  • Add a project, and start Forecastifying!

Regarding your employees​

Work schedules​

  • All of your employees are set up to have a standard work week of 8 hrs on each weekday
  • Forecastify will use this information to determine if your employees have logged the appropriate amount of hours each day
  • If you have employees who work less than 40 hrs per week, you can should make these changes to their work schedules

Teams​

  • A powerful organizational tool within Forecastify is the ability to create teams for your employees, complete with their resource or financial lead
  • Resource leads will be responsible for approving absence requests and resource allocation within our system
  • Financial leads will be able to see financial details and summaries of your employees and their projects
  • We didn’t want to stack this onto the onboarding process, so at the start there will be no teams set up
  • Setting the teams up will allow the absence requests, resource allocation system to work better, and grant access to dedicated dashboards for your team leads

Tiers and Rates​

  • In order to dial in your costs correctly, your employees need to be in the correct tier, and the tier needs to correct rate to be associated with it
  • Your employees likely won’t have exactly the same wages even if they are in the same role, and also, you should account for additional overheads like your office rental and similar upkeep costs
  • For the best way to calculate your tiers and rates, refer to this article in our knowledge base

Roles, departments, external users​

  • All employees appreciate if the management system they are a part of accurately reflects their role in your organization
  • You should take the time to set up all the possible user attributes, like role, seniority and departments, along with competencies and privileges - and then associate your employees with them
  • If you allow external contractors to directly access your Project Management tool and timesheet into your systems, you should set them up as external within user management. This will allow you to more closely monitor their contributions and can even set an entirely customized rate for them

Regarding your projects​

Unfortunately, setting up your projects correctly is the most time consuming, yet also the most important part of configuration. After the onboarding process, the system only has a vague idea about the structure of your projects, so let’s delve into what you can do to get the most out of Forecastify

Project types​

  • Forecastify differentiates between Fixed Prices, Ongoing and Outsource projects
  • This is crucial, since these three types have completely different screens (and entities under the hood) associated with them
  • To determine what type best represents your projects, refer to this article in our knowledge base

Milestones, Contracts and etc​

  • In Forecastify, the basic building block of the financial module is not a project, but it’s sub-entity, like a Milestone
  • After the onboarding process, all of your projects will be of Normal type, and contain a single all-encompassing milestone within them
  • If you wish to see more fine-grained information and breakdowns, take the time to set up your projects’ milestones. This includes breaking your project up into smaller pieces, heavily dependent on their type.
  • All timesheets from your Project Management tool (which can be Forecastify itself) will be collected under milestones, and then summarized into projects, which allows you to track progress more accurately

Billing​

  • Forecastify has the ability to track invoices and their status
  • To save time, we have completely skipped this step during the onboarding process, but if your projects already have billed or billable milestones, you should add these to the system

Miscellaneous​

  • Forecastify’s project entities can store much more information about your projects than their name and a few numbers
  • For clarity, and to make full use of the system, you should take the time to fill out the details of your projects

Tickets, Estimates, Timesheets, etc​

External Ticketing system:​

  • These are always synchronized from your Project Management tool, so you don’t need to do anything in Forecastify
  • When you first start using Forecastify, you might find that things are changing rapidly in the source system. Forecastify will automatically synchronize during the night, but you can find buttons on all relevant screens to perform this on demand, so you can see the effect of your changes immediately

Selftracking with Forecastify​

  • You can set up your own tickets which employees can log time on yourself
  • This is done on the project's page where you want the ticket to go to
  • In this case you also have access to an extra screen, where your employees can see the existing tickets, manage them, and log time on them

Regarding resource allocation​

Resource management, utilization​

  • To save time, we have completely skipped this step during the onboarding process, but as an extra layer of planning and control, you can allocate your employees and teams to specific projects
  • Setting this up for the past is only relevant if you were already doing this in some way, in an Excel sheet for example. In this case, it might be a good idea to move that information into Forecastify, so you can allow it to summarize and report how well your organization adhered to your plans
  • Setting this up for the future provides much the same benefit as doing it for the past, and of course, will help the system identify problems or action items even from one day to the next, highlighting if your employees are not well utilized, or haven’t actually been working on what they were allocated to

Regarding the absence tracking system​

Absences​

  • You can track your employees’ absence requests and holidays within Forecastify
  • This isn’t strictly required, but will help the system to more closely model and calculate your organization’s performance
  • You have full control over what kind of absences you want to differentiate, their quotas and etc
  • You can set up “Special Days” like national holidays and such that your organization observes too