New Intervals Features and Improvements

Introducing invoicing by person, tracking down missing timesheets, project expense reporting, more granular filtering of project feeds along with the ability to subscribe to them via RSS, and more…

Our October Intervals release is just the latest collection of features and improvements to make it into our online project management software.  Log in to your Intervals account, or create a free 30 day trial, to give these updates a try. Meanwhile, continue reading on for more details.

Project Feed Filters and RSS Subscriptions

Introduced in our previous update, the project feed has proven indispensable for staying up to date on projects. So we’ve added some additional functionality to make the project feed even more useful. Filter the project feed by person to see who has done what recently, or filter by type of update — document uploads, for example — to see what areas of the project have been updated.

The new RSS subscription feature can be used to subscribe to an RSS feed of this page using any RSS reader that supports HTTP authentication. Using your favorite RSS reader to subscribe to Intervals project updates is a great way to stay up to date without having to log in to your Intervals account. On the desktop, we recommend using FeedReader for subscribing to RSS feeds from Intervals projects. Please click through to our forum post on Intervals RSS feeds for more reader options and instructions on setting them up.

Create Invoices by Person

In addition to creating invoices by milestone, task, module, task status, and date, invoices can now be created by person. With this addition invoices can be delineated to show how much of the work each person performed.

For example, creative agencies that bill out different rates for each person can include this level of detail on the invoice. IT companies might want to include details of which technicians performed the billable work. And a web development shop can provide an invoice showing how much time was billed by regular employees and subcontractors. There are a number of ways that creating invoices by person may be useful.

Missing Timesheets Report

To reduce the amount of administrative overhead when managing projects, Intervals only creates timesheets for people who actually track their time. This prevents an overabundance of timesheets being created for people who don’t track their time. But what about people who *should* be tracking their time, but aren’t?

The missing timesheets report lists the people and dates for which no timesheets exist.  Filter the listing by date, person, and access level to find out which timesheets should have been filled out, but weren’t. Then notify them via email to remind people to fill out their timesheets for any given week. The missing timesheets report can be found under the Time tab.

Expenses Report

Intervals allows expenses and fees to be entered against individual projects. The new expenses report provides a way to view and calculate expense and fee totals across any date range for clients, projects and project managers. The report can also group the results by these date, client, or project to calculate subtotals for each one. The expenses report can be found under the Reports tab.

Reveal Time Descriptions on the Project Activity Report

The project activity report is one of the most verbose reports available via Intervals, providing every last detail of each time entry. Except for one. We’ve always errored on the side of caution and excluded the description of each time entry from the project activity report. The risk of a subcontractor or employee saying too much or too little and making its way onto this report just seemed too great.

We’ve had a lot of customers ask if these descriptions could be included on this report, so we’ve added the option to do so. Time entry descriptions are still excluded by default, but getting them onto the report only requires checking one box. If you ever need to report or justify where your time has been going this is definitely the report to check out.

These are just a few of the noteworthy updates for this release. Please feel free to send us any comments, questions, or criticism, by clicking on the “General question?” link at the bottom of any page from within your account. We’d love a shout-out.