From Signed Contract to Project Launch: Automate Your Workflow with Zoho Contracts, Flow, and Projects

Since Timesheet is one of our most popular modules, we are constantly working on improving your time logging and time tracking experience. As a result, we now have an enhanced version of Timesheet with added options and a different look and feel. Here’s what’s new:

User-based timesheet views

The default timesheet view used to be Group by Date. If you are the admin or manager of a large team, you may often want to see the timesheet reports for each of your employees working across different projects. You could do that by using the filters and manually selecting the users you need. To make this even simpler, in addition to the Group by Date option, we now have the Group by User option. With this option, you get a view of the timesheet entries in all projects listed out user-wise. You can also filter the results to show only the users who have not logged time.

Reports for a custom date range

In addition to the weekly, monthly, and daily view of entries, you now have the option to select a custom date range. If you wish to view the timesheet entries for a particular period, selecting the date range will do the job for you.

Timesheet report across all projects

You can now generate a report for the whole span of all your projects. This will give you a view of how each of your projects is doing in terms of the logged hours, the budgeted amount, the invoiced amount, and the difference between the two. You can also create smaller, time range-specific reports by applying the appropriate filters.

Client-wise timesheet report across projects

This is a timesheet report of all the client companies that have been associated with your portal. You can view the projects under each client company, how many hours have been logged for each, the budgeted and the expended amount.

Improvements in the Calendar and Gantt charts

We have also made a couple of useful tweaks to our Calendar and Gantt charts. The Calendar gets a makeover with better color variations and icon representations.

By default, the My Calendar and Gantt chart views display work items that only belong to you. If you are an admin or a manager who wishes to see work items of other users, you had to apply the filter to select the users you need. Now with our new enhancement, you can just close the “Me” filter to get an all users  complete view.

Interested in dominating "timesheets"? You can learn more in the button below. Blog post written by Pearlyn Anugraha

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Connect Zoho Projects with more than 500 apps using Zapier

Business information today is buried within multiple applications like sales, finance, and marketing. But good business decisions demand unified views of this data. Zoho offers a suite of tightly integrated cloud applications that can run an entire business, serving as a complete business operating system. Nevertheless, we also integrate with other apps.

Zapier is an integrated platform that connects applications and automates the flow of data between them. It allows business users to retrieve data from different systems, based on specific triggers.

Today, we are happy to announce that Zoho Projects has been added to this platform, allowing users to connect with more than 500 apps accessible from Zapier.

How it works

This is best explained through an example. Let’s say you’re managing a construction project within Zoho Projects. You want to automatically create a task that validates the invoice against your contracts and alerts your accounting department whenever you receive a supplier invoice in your Gmail account. You would create a Zap. 

Using the ‘Make a New Zap’ wizard, you would set the new email as the ‘trigger’ and set up, ‘create new task’ within Zoho Projects as the ‘action’ for that trigger.  You can also configure the Zoho and Gmail accounts you want to use in this wizard and make things clearer by using the subject of the mail as the name of the task.

This is a simple example of what a Zap can do. Each app in Zapier exposes its own sets of triggers and actions covering ways in which data can flow into and out of it. Filters provide finer control. Picking what you want from these is just a matter of a few clicks and the automation you need is ready.

Ways to link Zoho Projects

You can set Zoho Projects either as a trigger app, or an action app. In the above example, it acts as an action app. If you want to create, say an event in Google Calendar whenever a new milestone is created in Zoho Projects, then the later would act as a trigger app. You could choose the trigger or action as any of the following:

1. Create a new project

2. Create a new milestone

3. Create a new task list

4. Create a new task

5. Create a new bug

 Here are a few sample Zaps for you to check out:

This entry was posted in Zoho Projects by Hari Narayanan.