iZepto Blog

Although the functionality has been there for a while now, we thought it was worth blogging about some new functionality in iZepto - Leave Management.

At Shine Technologies, we found that the process of leave requests and time management were pretty closely linked.  So, we updated iZepto to handle it.  Now, you can mark a task a ‘leave’ task.  For instance, you probably have a task for ‘Annual Leave’ or ‘Maternity Leave’.  You can now mark that as a leave task and your users can request to take ‘Annual Leave’.  They pick one of the Admins as an approver.

The system emails Admins daily if they have any requests that need approval.  You can easily see a Gantt chart of all leave requests, and even filter them by status or date range or group.

Once approved, the requesting user gets an email and their time for that period is automatically filled out.  Neat!

A final feature added today is Leave Reconciliation.  Now your accountant or book keeper can do a check between what was requested and what was actually taken.  At Shine we use this as the last step prior to updating our payroll system with leave actually taken.

As a nice extra, check out the iCal feed beneath the Gantt chart.  I have a subscription in iCal on my Mac (but any iCal conforming application will work) that shows all leave requests for people in my group.  They show up as an all-day event at the top of my calendar and is a nice reminder not to expect a certain team member in that day!

Today we have added a ‘Same as Yesterday’ and ‘Same as Last Week’ feature in the Time Entry page.  If you haven’t entered time for a particular day, but you do have time entered for the previous day you will get a prompt like the picture below.If you click the link it will simply apply all time entry for the current day the same as the previous day.  Nifty!It would be great to get some feedback on whether you think this is helpful.

Based on the feedback from last week, we have implemented the first phase of the sharing of information with people outside of iZepto.

When you set up a watch, you can now enter a list of email addresses to send the watch to. These can be external people outside of iZepto, such as your client. This way they can see the total of a watch (such as effort this week, month to date or for ever) in a handy daily email.

They are CC’d on the email sent to you, so you know exactly what they are seeing!

Try it out and let us know what you think!

We just put up another release yesterday, and I encourage you to try out one of the best new features: creating tasks on the fly.
I don’t know about you, but one of my pet peeves of timesheets is the point where you go to enter your time only to find that the task you need to enter time against isn’t there.  You have to go ask your boss to add it, or at least interrupt your flow to go to the administration area.In iZepto, this is no longer a problem!

Just start typing like normal, and if you find that your task isn’t there, then just type the full name of the task that you would like as like above we will show you a little hint that we are going to create this task for you if you press tab or click on the suggestion like normal.  Voila!
We throw these tasks into a special project called TBC (to be confirmed), and in the Admin area we show you a handy list of tasks that you probably need to allocate at some point like this:

If you then click the link you get to Approve (allocate it to a project), Merge (put all time against the task the person should have used) or Reject.  It looks like this:

 Reject sends an email to the user telling them what has been deleted so that they know what they need to re-enter.  We also add a Scratchpad item with the same details so that they don’t lose it.
We are going to tweak the functionality soon to make it even easier to Allocate.  Right now if the project doesn’t already exist you have to go back to the main Admin area, so we want to avoid that step as well.
So, give it a try!  I can assure you it is one of my favourite features already… 

We just added a feature to iZepto to allow you to see who is keeping their timesheet up to date. It is one of those features that seemed like a good idea, but until I saw it in action against our production data I didn’t realise how useful it would be.The system we used to use allowed to find this information out - it was just a bit hard. So we never really did it except when we had to. Usually at the start of a month doing the invoices. Then I found out people hadn’t been logging time correctly or at all. Sometimes this even caused some grief with clients as I had to go back and say “You know how I said we had only used 10 days budget… I meant to say 50 days”. Ouch. So rejoice all you iZepto users, you can now have your finger even tighter on the pulse of your business - with little effort. Oh, and don’t miss the ‘Send Reminder’ link. It sends an email straight to the user. Awesome!