Skip to main content

Onboarding Overview

Forecastify works best when it has lots of data available and configurations set. Setting it all up may seem daunting at first, which is why we have taken extra care to deliver results as early as possible. In the following articles you will find all the information you need to get going quickly, and how to delve deeper and complete all customization options later.

Your experience heavily depends on what tool you are already using. If you are tracking your work in a system like Atlassian's Jira or JetBrains' YouTrack, you have the option to run the onboarding process where Forecastify will use this external system to fill and initialize data in its own database. If you aren't using Jira or YouTrack, you will take a different route.

The Onboarding process for Jira or YouTrack​

After signing up for Forecastify, you will be greeted by our Onboarding mechanism. It serves to allow you to set things up quickly in an easy to use and streamlined fashion. The process has the following steps:

  • The API key (of your external project management tool, like Jira or Youtrack)
    • We will use this to connect to the tool you already use, and import whatever we can from it, saving you the hassle of reentering the data
  • Your access levels
    • Forecastify comes with a fully configurable access management system, allowing fine-grained control over who can see what in the application
    • At this stage we provide you with a set of sensible defaults, leaving the details for when you can already access the full application
  • Your user attributes
    • Forecastify strives to be a single source of truth for your organization’s employees, complete with their role, department and competencies
    • You will be able to define your own possibilities for each of these categories, and you can already do so here
  • Your chosen currency
    • Forecastify works best if you set a single currency that your organization uses for its internal elszámolás
  • Your employee’s tiers and their rates
    • Forecastify uses a slightly abstract system to track your employees’ wages and additional costs
    • In this system, employees are organized into tiers, and each tier has a specific hourly rate associated with it
    • You can set up your initial tiers and costs here. Don’t worry, all of this can be fine-tuned later
  • Your users
    • Every employee whose work is tracked in your organization should have an account in Forecastify
    • At first, all we need is a name and email address to allow the accounts to be set up, we will attempt to gather this information from the initial synchronization
  • Setting up your users
    • At this point you are able to associate all the different attributes to your users.
    • The only requirement at this point is to have at least one all-powerful admin user selected, everything else can be skipped
    • However, we encourage you to use the available batch selection and configuration tools to quickly set roles and privileges, titles and competencies, tiers and costs of your users here
  • Your clients
    • In order to help with categorizing your projects right from the start, you can add your main clients here
  • Your projects
    • Your projects will be imported from the initial synchronization
    • Depending on how far your records go back, the import may include a staggering amount of projects. Don’t worry, you can choose which ones you want to actually add to Forecastify, filtering them by date as well
    • In order to show you basic budgeting and forecasting information, we must have a few core attributes of your projects, which you can add here
    • Don’t worry, any and all project information can be changed or added later

Onboarding process for SelfTracking​

In this case, you will receive an "empty" Forecastify instance, set up with your initial users and a few sensible defaults. A good order of setting things up is as follows:

  • User Access Levels: Set up your desired access levels by creating your Roles and assigning privileges into them, or use the Defaults in the system
  • User Attributes: Before you import your users, it is beneficial to setup the attributes you will be assigning to each of them, such as: Departments, Roles, Seniority, Competencies
  • Users: It is time to add your colleagues! You can use the Excel import / export feature to speed up this process
  • Tiers and Rates: In order to calculate your spenditure and budgeting correctly, Forecastify needs to be aware of your costs
  • Clients: In order to have Projects, you need Clients available in the system
  • At this point, you are reasonably ready to start adding Projects and utilize the bulk of Forecastify's features
  • Absences: To be able to properly track employee's, you should complete the absence setup as well: set PTO configurations and special days (eg. National Holidays) in the system
  • Teams: You can organize your employees into Teams, allowing the PTO and Overtime requests to work properly, and enabling additional filtering and aggregation possibilities
  • Work schedules: By default, everyone is assigned a standard 40h workweek with 8h for each day. If you have employees working on different schedules, you should set these up in the system
  • Resource management: Closely related to the projects themselves, once the system is fully aware how much your employees are supposed to work, you can start assigning them to your projects, while being able to review their utilization information