May 24, 2001

Suite-wide: improved project-based time and expense approvals.

Project managers using OpenAir can now more efficiently approve time and expenses related to their project. To enable the project-level approvals, administrators navigate to My Account>Company>Setting and check the "Enable project approvals" boxes. Then when a project is created, a designated project approver -- often the project manager -- is chosen. When a user submits time or expenses associated with a project that require project-level approvals, the project approver is the first person to review and approve the time and expense. Additionally, the project approver only sees that information specifically related to their project.

Projects: finish date for projects & tasks, milestone creation, task filtering.

Project managers can now easily view the start and finish dates when viewing high-level project data. To see project finish dates in the Projects>Tracked screen, click on the "Customize" link at the bottom of the screen and choose "Finish Date" from the pick list. Project finish dates are calculated by summing all the durations and dependencies of tasks in the project.

In OpenAir Projects the addition of a "Finish Date" column on the Projects>Task List screen now makes it easier for users to understand when tasks need to be completed. Plus, users can now sort more specifically on tasks assigned to them to eliminate the hassle of seeing other users' tasks.

We have also implemented a more intuitive method for creating a project milestone. When viewing a project outline view, just navigate to the New Entries: Create dropdown in the upper right corner of the screen and select "Milestone."

Opportunities: contact functionality, billing contact designation, other features.

OpenAir has revised the manner in which we organize clients, prospects, and contacts in our application. Clients are defined as those organizations that are current/previous customers and that can have time and expenses billed to them. Prospects are defined as organizations that are a potential customer and that cannot have time or expenses billed to them. Contacts are defined as individuals who are associated with either a client or a prospect organization. As with all other OpenAir data, administrators can configure the system to provide users specific permission to view and/or edit contact level information.

OpenAir now allows users to associate more than one contact with each client, mimicking the existing ability to associate more than one contact with a sales prospect. In addition, billing managers can now designate certain contacts within a client to be the billing contact to whom invoices are sent. Navigate to Account>Client>[choose appropriate client] to configure billing contacts.

OpenAir users can now manage individual contacts more efficiently. Users can view a list of all contacts on the Any Module>Account>Contacts screen. The contact list view can be configured to include all or any subset of the available data, including name, job title, company, work phone, mobile phone, fax number, email, Web address, or any other custom fields needed by your company. Contacts can also be sorted and filtered to provide users with the specific information needed.

Users can now import contacts from a variety of sources including comma-separated value (CSV) files, text files, Microsoft Outlook®, Intuit QuickBooks Pro®, and Peachtree®. Plus users can easily report on any contact data with the new Contacts detail report on the Reports>Detail screen.

OpenAir users can now move clients or prospects between each state to the other -- from client to prospect or vice versa -- with the click of a button on the Opportunities>Prospects or Clients>[select appropriate client or prospect]>Edit> [check/uncheck box marked "Prospect"].

Reports: color reports, client filter for profitability reports, missing timesheet report.

Executives, resource managers, and project managers who monitor utilization can now view reports that use color-coding to highlight key information. The custom color set up is located at the Reports>Summary and Other reports tabs>[choose desired report]>click on Color Coding option. Use the color coding to provide better visibility into resources who are not staffed or is underutilized, to understand more quickly which resources have submitted too much time for specific clients, etc.

Executives who use the Financial Analysis report can now filter the data viewed by client, in addition to user and project.

Individuals responsible for employee timesheet and expense report submission compliance can now use the Late Timesheet report located at Reports>Other> Missing Timesheet Report to identify which resources have not submitted data.

Proposals, Timesheets, Invoices: option to disable service as default time description.

At the request of several users, we implemented a switch on the My Account> Company>Setting>[choose from Optional Features list] screen to prevent an associated service from becoming the default text in a dialog box's description field.

Integration: tilde as field delimiter, tax exporting.

Our professional services team now has more sophisticated options to integrate OpenAir with your existing systems. OpenAir can read import/export files that use a tilde as a delimiter between data fields. Also, import/export records can now better accommodate tax percentages associated with an invoice.

Would you like to see previous OpenAir product updates?

Click here to browse previous product updates including all new features, modules and functionality.

Suggestions, problems or questions?

As always, please contact us at support@openair.com or 888.367.1715 (outside the U.S. and Canada, call 617-351-0226). We want to ensure that OpenAir improves your company’s bottom line.