Introducing Effort Classes

An advanced time tracking feature has been added to give organizations the ability to collect more information when their employees register their time in 4me. This information can then be used to track costs more accurately and may also be used to gather the data needed for internal chargeback or billing.

This new time tracking feature makes it possible for organizations to define the difference in cost for different types of work, or different periods during which work is performed. This may be important if long-term contractors are compensated differently for their work as a developer versus when they act as a project manager, or when employees need to receive overtime pay if they work on a Sunday. These variations in the cost of time spent can now be defined in 4me as effort classes. An organization’s 4me administrator can register them in the ‘Effort Classes’ section of the Settings console.
For each effort class it is possible to specify the impact on costs of the organization for which the person works who selected the effort class. This is done by specifying a value in the Cost multiplier field. For example, the organization may pay its employees twice their normal wage when they are asked to work on a Sunday. The cost multiplier, in combination with the cost per hour that is specified in the person records, is used by 4me to calculate the cost for each time entry.

After the effort classes have been registered, they can be placed in a logical order by dragging and dropping them at a higher or lower position in the list. The next step is to relate the effort classes to the timesheet settings that are used by the organizations which people should be able to select one of these effort classes when they register their time.

In the timesheet settings it is also possible to specify the default values that the Effort class field should have in requests, problems, tasks and time entries that are linked to a time allocation. The default value will then be selected in the Effort class field after a value has been entered in the Time spent field.

Change and project managers will be happy to hear that it is possible to already specify the appropriate effort class in each change and project task template. The values selected in these templates overwrite the default values specified in the timesheet settings.