ReportAway!®

As of Release 1.3 of ReportAway there are three options for use of Customers and Projects. Which option you use is a function of how tightly coupled your Projects are to a given Customer.

Option 1.

With this option you pre-configure a hard association between the Project and the Customer under the Administration->Project List screen. The benefit of this option is that, when creating a Time or Expense entry, you only have to pick the Project. The Customer is automatically selected for you. The trade-off of using this option, is that if you have one project (e.g. Service) that is used across all customers, this option does not work as well as the next second option.

NOTE: QuickBook users, the imported job field when using this option will be reported as "Customer:Project".

Option 2.

The second option involves keeping Projects and Customers completely separate. In this option, when creating projects under the Administration->Project List screen, make sure the Customer field is set to "Default". The benefit of this option is that a single project definition can be used across any number of Customers. The disadvantage of this option is that when creating Time and Expense entries, you must explicitly select both the Customer and Project fields.

NOTE: QuickBook users, the imported job field when using this option will be reported as follows;

case a) if Customer = "Default" and Project = "foo"  then the job field is reported as "Default:foo".

case b) if Customer = "foo" and Project = "bar" then the job field is reported as "foo:bar"

case c) if Customer = "foo" and Project = "Default" then the job field is reported as "foo"

Option 3.

This is a mix of Options 1 and 2. Nothing in ReportAway! precludes you from having a mix of pre-configured associations of Project to Customer as well as separate Projects and Customers. When using Option 3, please keep in mind that both Time and Expense Entry Editors will prompt you to confirm cases where you are requesting to override a pre-configured Project association to a Customer.

For example, suppose you have the following setup:

1. You have configured CustomerA, CustomerB, ProjectA and ProjectB. ProjectA is configured to be associated with CustomerA and ProjectB is configured to be associated with CustomerB.

2. Next create a new Time Entry and select ProjectA. The Customer field is automatically set to CustomerA.

3. Next you go to the Customer field of the Time Entry created in step 2 and override it's value to be CustomerB (i.e you are creating a Time Entry with Project=ProjectA and Customer=CustomerB. In this case you will prompted to confirm the fact that you are overriding a pre-configured association between ProjectA and CustomerA.