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Project management invoice template for Human Resources

air table is a great project management tool but sometimes it can be hard to discover all of the project management features air table has because in reality air table can be used to build multiple different applications and isn't just solely a project management tool so in this video we're going to talk about how to use the right views how we can template our project creation and how we can create air table interfaces that support our project management processes hi I'm Dan Leman from Automation helpers.com and we're an air table implementation partner now prior to building automation ERS I was running a Professional Services team at zoom and it was really important for me to be able to see multiple projects that my team was managing and a lot of project management systems don't actually have a really good portfolio view or the idea of being able to see multiple projects at the same time and this is one of the features that I love most about the Gant chart view that we have inside of air table so again a Gant chart is just another kind of view we can create it down here by selecting that view and as I look at this Gant chart I'm able to see multiple projects so I've got two different implementation that are going on I can of course filter these out if I only want to look at one project at a time but when I'm looking at the big picture of what projects can we take on and resources that we have who can actually complete the project I want to be able to see this all up view now within the Gant chart there's a lot of details and we created a separate dedicated video to everything you need to know about Gant charts we'll link to that as well but here what I really like is that we can have our different dependencies we can have Milestones I'm able to color code this by different things in my case I like looking at by phase so you can see how we have different phases of tasks as we go throughout the life cycle of our project and of course all of this is drag and droppable so if I say ooh actually we have to bump this project out by a few days and so we move our discovery that we have out that's going to actually shift the dates of that project ing to the dependencies that we have and we're able to click into a task and see information about the predecessors and the successors to that task now a gantar can be really useful if you are a project manager or you're a business owner and you want to be able to see an all-up VI you but if you're an individual resource you might not really care about the big picture and you want to focus on what's on your plate today that often times happened with my team I'd have Technical Resources and they'd say Dan what do I need to focus on today what's my priority and honestly I think a conon which is just another kind of view is one of the easiest views for being able to see what do I need to work on and we can have this filtered we can create an individual list we're saying hey show this based on status or the status is not empty and the assign is me here's my work we could have different priorities izations on here and then all I need to do is say hey here's what I'm working on great this is in progress now now I've finished this task it's done and that is a really easy way to be able to get your team onboarded and using the system now there's a lot of debate about the best way to implement subtasks for air table I don't really think air table has the strongest implementation of subtasks frankly because there isn't one you can do things like you can have some rich text check boxes in a field and you can check them off but it's not really connected to anything there's a few different ways to do do it but I want to show you my favorite way of handling subtasks within the system so I've actually created a separate table for my subtasks and I'm using the list view list view feels something a little bit more akin to notion if you've ever used notion before and here if I scroll down we're looking at this is a a project that I have so I'm looking at project at my top level I've got tasks underneath that and then subtasks underneath that so what I can do is I can add a new subtask here is a subtask and then fill in any information here such as dates that I have for this this is all configurable what we want to be able to show we'll mark this as uh in progress here and now I can view my tasks I can view my subtasks I can view it in the context of the project and see our project health and the account that it's linked to so this is how I typically Implement subtasks again there's a number of different ways to slice it but I think that this is pretty easily usable especially when you have projects that are more detailed you need to get into that smaller level to be able to have items that people can just check off as they're going about their work again if you'd like to see more details on how to implement this we have a separate video on building our list views air table forms are really easy way if you need to do project intake so maybe you have sales reps who are logging a new project they're selling something and then you've got to implement it you can create your own intake forms and make those external to other people that are outside of the company outside of your business unit who need to help create those projects and you can have automations that run in the background to help you process access those projects now air table forms are pretty good they've got some outof thebox capabilities to capture information with the fields that you have on your records and it doesn't take any special syncing or automations to capture that information but I'd say in about 60% of the projects that we do with clients we're using a tool called fill out which integrates with a table and honestly just feels like a great extension of it we're doing things like if that intake form actually has multiple objects multiple tables associated with it maybe you needed to create new contacts who are related to your project at the same time that you're creating the project intake those are great use cases that you might want to take a look at fill out for building that and we'll also link to a course that we've created it's an entirely free course about how to use fill out with air table now next I want to show you a little bit about resource allocation and this is a little bit buried inside of air table so this is part of the timeline view that itself is easy enough to find if you press that plus button and create a new timeline but if you click on this summarize button up at the top this this is where we get to actually choose different ways of summarizing our data and utilization is one of the ways to summarize it so if we click on utilization up here we can say what are the number of hours that a project should take and we can pull that so we've got our estimated hours from the project and then down here we're actually doing a lookup and saying hey where is this information coming from about the types of resources what I really like here is that you don't have to use the assign field this doesn't have to be users of air table you could could look at resource allocation like being individual assets that you might have or rooms that you're booking in a conference center there's lots of different ways that we could look at resource allocation and it's very configurable in this case we're accounting for time off so we're actually using a separate table of people human resources that we're booking and here we can book their time off where they're not available and then from here we can color this in different ways so maybe you have a Target utilization if you're a Professional Services organiz ation like we are maybe you say hey your target utilization rate is 75% so if you're around that rate we want to be able to have a different color for you if you're way over booked we want to be able to see that color differently and if you're way under booked that's no good for us either so here we can see the different projects that these resources are working on and above that we've got our summarization where we can see what percentage utilized we are in this case this resource Diana is underutilized on these days we can also see her PTO available here uh Dan myself I guess I'm in that adequate range for utilization and then we've got some folks who are above and we should probably color that differently but they're above 100% so they're going to be pretty busy during this time and we can use this to help us determine as we have new projects coming in who we want to assign those projects too okay so we've talked about some of the different views you might want to utilize when it comes to project management but there's other functions within air table as well so in the older days of air table there was an extension that we could use which would allow us to create templates for projects it was very technical though you had to say pick a parent table and then pick a type table and a template table and now we got to map all this stuff and we created a separate video on that this still comes in handy if you have to do some customization you can do a little bit of scripting but by and large we never use this anymore because there's a new feature under Tools where we can set up record templates and this comes in really handy if you have projects that are roughly the same from Project to project so you have some kind of implementation and you do this implementation with multiple clients or maybe you have three tiers of implementation that looks different by company size you can create these different templates and in there we can actually create the linked records for it we can create some default data and there's a lot of functionality that goes into this and here we're saying for every implementation project I want you to create these five or six different tasks that we have here and everyone is going to look like that and for each of those tasks if I click into it we're going to assign this to the person who's the logged in user who's creating this project we're going to set that status to to-do we're going to put it in a certain phase and we're actually going to put in start and end dates which we're going to do dynamically based off of when we're actually clicking the button to create this new project so now when I have a new project and we want to template that out all I have to do is press my plus button down here I can choose from that Enterprise project template that's going to spin through look how quick that was in creating it we've got our implementation project it's assigned it to us it's put it in to do we've got the start date and end date based on our tasks that we have here and you can see if we pop this open the different tasks that it has created for us so this makes our lives so much easier especially if your projects have that kind of repetition where you want to be able to duplicate those projects and have new tasks created for them each time but based on a template that you've already created there is so much we can do with air tables interfaces this really has streamlined so many companies operations to make it much easier for individual resources so you don't have to have someone who's always pivoting between Gant views and the grid views to be able to manage their data in this case let's talk about time entry for projects well an older way of doing it would be to say hey for every task you have to log your time but let's say we don't really care about that maybe we want to have a nice time entry view where I can just say what did I work on for the week so I've created an air table interface here I'm choosing myself as the team member and I'm going to create a brand new time sheet so I'm going to click this button here and and what this automation runs in the background is what we're seeing it actually is looking at the projects I have assigned to me that are currently open and it's creating a new time sheet entry for each of those separate projects now I need better naming conventions I named two of them implementation projects here but in this case now I can simply go through and put in hey I worked five hours on this project and I did two hours here notice what's happening as it's updating on the sides I updated 8 hours here and here I put in 3 hours and as we're entering all of that information you can see that it's totaling this up because we're using formulas and automations that keep all this information up to date and this is so much easier than many other ways of doing time entry I can just put it into a grid and I'm good to go now I can put comments here if I said oh hey this is a little funky because we did something different this week we're leaving comments in the record and then when we're all done with this we can go ahead and submit that time time sheet to our boss so that they can review it I get that check mark and this updated our record and presumably we'd have an automation to then reassign it so we could go through an approval process now if you're interested in these air table interfaces and kind of getting started and learning some of the best practices we've got a separate video on that so we'll link to it as well but this is something we also do a lot for clients because we're finding that almost every client wants to build on interfaces that are so much more powerful than just using a table without the interface capabilities I do I want to show you a separate example here where now we can say okay we did our time sheet entry but now we want to go ahead and actually invoice the client so I'm going to wear a separate hat now I'm a manager or I'm on the billing side and what we're going to do is we're going to choose from our accounts that we have here so I've got Pi Piper and we're going to create a new invoice so I'm going to click and again this is going to run an Automation in the background okay so this time what our automation did was it actually looked for all of the time sheet records that haven't been buil yet already and it pulled it in so regardless of our resource or team member it pulled it in and now we need to take these and Bill our client so we've got our bill rate that's coming in from our customer account information this is totaling up all of the hours for our client and then it's multiplying it across to get that total amount but the really cool part is is we can take this a step further we don't have to live just within the air table ecosystem we can actually click a button to invoice a client that's going to fire a web hook and we're using which is an iPass tool like zapier to be able to connect to QuickBooks where we actually do our client invoicing so now instead of having to do duplicate entry and summarize all this information and add all that before we send it on to the client now we can do that in a couple quick steps where we're simply clicking a button we're grabbing that information maybe we'd add a note or something for the client but we can click and send that onto our clients in a single step I hope it was helpful for you to see just how powerful project management in air table can be if you have any questions about getting started with air table or getting your project Management Solutions set up don't hesitate to reach out to automation helpers.com where we're offering free 30-minute consultations