Suggestions for Project/Invoice integration
After almost a month of managing our first project with Zoho Projects we are very satisfied with the results. It has been easy for our people to learn and use, and the feature set is comprehensive without being overwhelming. But now that we have generated our first invoice (using Zoho Invoice) we have discovered a couple of little problems. Not bugs, but programming design decisions that could easily cause real problems for users if they are not aware of how this works.
One of the consultants on our project has been tracking his time with the Timesheets feature. The reports in Projects/Timesheets all look correct and the exported csv/xls files contain all the proper information. BUT, when we created an invoice for the work in July the invoice did not contain all of the billable hours for July.
Figuring out where this went wrong has been difficult because Zoho Invoice doesn't get all the project details - it only seems to get the hours rolled up by task. Also, where Projects shows hours as HH.MM, when the time is transferred to Invoice it is shown as decimal hours. So we carefully went through the invoice by hand and compared it to the exported timesheet, and we now see that some hours were not included in the invoice.
What happened is that when we selected the start/end dates for the invoice we clicked on July 1 as the starting date and July 31 for the ending date. But that's not right - it left off the hours worked on July 31. We really should have picked Aug 1 as the ending date. I personally think that's bad user interface design, but I can understand how a programmer would make that decision.
Here are a few simple suggestions for the next upgrade:
1) Whenever time is displayed as HHMM it should use a colon as HH:MM. That would make it immediately clear that it's hours and minutes and not a decimal number. This could be based on the user's language or date setting selection if the colon is not appropriate worldwide.
2) Selecting dates for invoices should be inclusive so that July 1 - July 31 means all hours between AND INCLUDING those dates. A small note on the date picker screen would alert existing users to the new behavior. If you don't want to make that change then you should include a warning on the date picker that the ending day will NOT be included in the totals.
3) There should be an option to transfer/display all detail to Zoho Invoice. In other words I would like the option to have the invoice like this:
Name of task 1
Person, Date, Hours
Person, Date, Hours
Total hours on task 1
Name of task 2
Person, Date, Hours
Person, Date, Hours
Total hours on task 2
I hope these suggestions are helpful.