How do I set up ongoing non-billable projects

Owned by Thomas Sherman (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jan 28, 2019

It is typical to have some projects in your installation that are ongoing. For example a G&A project to record non-billable employee time. Projector recommends that you use year long engagements to track these projects. By creating a new engagement for each year you will optimize performance editing projects and running reports. Your employees will also be happy when they do not need to scroll through five years of scheduling data to get to the most recent month!

Solution

When creating your new engagements you will probably want to make use of the clone project feature. These steps should work for most customers.

  1. Find your existing non-billable project in the project browser
  2. Right click it and choose Clone Project
  3. Choose New Engagement
  4. Set the lower project fields as appropriate for your installation
  5. Click Next
  6. Clone Roles - you may want to clone all roles. If there is turnover this may be a good time to remove roles for people that are no longer with the company
    1. Do not check Clone Hours. This will impact the performance gains you would get from creating a new engagement.
  7. In order to make this change transparent to your end users you should set the old G&A project's end date to just before the new project's start date. So for example your old G&A project would have an end date of Dec 31 and your new G&A project would have a start date of Jan 1. This keeps only one G&A project showing up on their timesheets at any given time.
  8. Check that the remaining settings make sense for your installation

If you are breaking up an existing G&A project, you may want to make multiple new engagements, defined by year, and then transfer time in bulk to the appropriate engagement.

Although Projector can "lazy load" projects, we still recommend yearly engagements as opposed to yearly projects. Reason being, some calculations are still engagement wide. If you need to link engagements together for reporting purposes, consider grouping them together via UDF, engagement type, client, etc.