Phew! What a stormer of a month. From managing profitability and customizing projects, to mapping out plans and understanding team capacity, there’s a little something for everybody this month. We’ve got a lot to show you, so let’s jump straight in!
Map out team and project plans with Tasks
Since launching our Tasks add-on last month, we’re already charging ahead with ideas to make it even easier to keep work visible—starting with creating a dedicated hub for mapping out team and project tasks. Behold your gorgeous, new Tasks page:
Your Tasks page gives you a clean visual overview of all tasks—which you can format either in a list or tactile timeline. You can also toggle between “People” and “Projects” to visualize the impact of new work on existing commitments.
The List view provides a single neat overview of all tasks related to a specific project or group of people. It’s great for scanning live and upcoming work, and assessing projects as a whole.
The Timeline view is ideal for mapping out a whole project delivery plan for multiple people, and lets you easily spot any scheduling gaps. It also lets you quickly move, re-assign and resize tasks, as well as scroll forwards and backwards to view past and future plans.
Crucially, it makes it easy to see the impact of new work on your team’s available capacity. Timely will break down the daily hours a person has available to work on a new task—highlighting time in the negative whenever your task exceeds their available capacity.
Learn about everything you can do with Tasks in Timely.
Tasks is the first step towards project planning in Timely and is available as an add-on to your Timely subscription for as little as $5/person a month.
🌟 Want to try out Tasks? Admins can start a free 14-day trial for everyone on their workspace from the Tasks page.
Plan time for multiple people
Team managers, rejoice! We’ve just made it super easy to plan for a bunch of people working on the same piece of work. No more copy-and-pasting between colleague calendars—you can now create a planned time entry for multiple people in one smooth action.
Provided you’re on our Unlimited plan, head to the Company view from your Hours page and you’ll notice you’ve gained a fun, new “+ Plan entries” button! Clicking this will reveal a Planning Editor.
Just add a note about the work, select the people you want to involve, hit “Submit” when you’re ready, and…💥! A corresponding planned entry will then be created for all the people you’ve selected—ideal for planning time for big group meetings and project work.
Set custom project colors
At Timely, we believe time keeping doesn’t have to be a boring, beige experience. Color is an amazingly powerful tool for visually organizing your work in a way that makes sense to you, as well as elevating your mood in the process.
That’s why we’ve just launched a snazzy project color picker, allowing you to set custom, web-safe project colors:
Whether you want to match time entries to your clients’ brand colors, give Timely an autumnal makeover, or dress your timesheet in this year’s top pantones (maybe not Ultimate Gray…), the choice is entirely yours.
Add non-billable time to a billable project
We’re exploring ways to make it even easier for you to stay on top of profitability in Timely. As a first step, we’re tackling one of your most-requested project optimizations: managing billable and non-billable time inside the same project.
When you go to add a time entry and select a project that has an hourly rate, you’ll notice this new “non-billable” option appears:
Just select this whenever you want to plan or log non-billable work to a billable project. The entry will then be added to your project without affecting its budget. ✨
This update brings project costs and revenue together into one space—ensuring you keep all the work you can’t bill back to your client visible. It’s ideal for capturing things like time spent training a new project member, fixing a bug covered by a warranty, or correcting a mistake.
Gone are the days of creating separate “billable” and “non-billable” projects for the same piece of client work! By allowing you to set the billable status of work at the time entry level, Timely now gives you a whole lot more flexibility and a lot less admin. It also makes reporting on project profitability a heck of a lot easier.
This functionality is available on all Timely plans across our web, desktop, and iOS apps—and it will be coming to Android very shortly, too. We’re also thinking about applying this logic to the reverse scenario, for adding a billable entry to a non-billable project—let us know if you would find this useful!
Painlessly make non-billable projects billable
Continuing on the theme of project profitability, we’ve also made it dramatically easier to transform a non-billable project into a billable one. That means, if you want to apply an hourly rate to an existing non-billable project, you can now do so in the blink of an eye!
When you go to add your hourly rate for the project, this message will appear:
This lets you choose whether want to apply an hourly rate to existing project time entries, or just to new ones. If you want to preserve historic non-billable entries, choose “New entries only”.
Hit save and your previously non-billable project will become billable, just like that. And remember—you can now log non-billable time entries to billable projects, so you really can have your cake and eat it too. 🧁
A cleaner view of team capacity
Finally, we’ve made two major updates to your People page to make it that little bit easier to manage team resources.
The first is visual—you may have already noticed the new color scheme from your Dashboard tab, but we’ve also redesigned the historic view of team hours to bring individual capacity into sharper focus. Instead of just seeing the total number of hours each person logs each week, you can now find a visual bar explaining how they ended the week against their capacity. For a blow-by-blow account of daily logged hours, just hop over to the “All Users” tab.
The second update is HUGE—planned time is now factored into team capacity! Any planned time for the current week will appear in striped green on a team member’s capacity bar, and it will also be factored into their “free capacity” calculations.
This should make staffing up projects and balancing workloads across your team a whole lot easier. Just hover over anyone’s capacity bar to get the full breakdown of their planned time, billable to non-billable ratio, and remaining capacity.
