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I want to "Lock" (without "Archiving") a project
There are situations where I want to prevent engineers from logging time on a project, but I don’t want to archive it.
For example: When the time spent on a project reaches its budget, I don’t want people working on it and exceeding the budget. However, I can’t archive it, because I haven’t invoiced the customer yet (and it’s not possible to create an invoice for time in an archived project).
How can I prevent users from logging time on the project, without archiving it?
Also, archiving the project makes it not readily visible/findable in the reporting window. We may want to see it in the reporting area for a little while after we want people to stop logging time to the project.
My firm also has the need to lock a project without archiving it for the reasons Jim specified. Until Harvest has this feature, we have added “Unbillable” as a task on all projects for time entries that exceed the budget. However, it is a bit tedious to revert time entries to “Unbillable” one at a time (see my write-down comment in Features Request). It would be useful to a) lock a project to prevent further time entries, b) to drill-down from reports to edit time entries to unbillable when they have gone over budget, and c) write-up or write-down all time entries for invoicing. FYI, we also “lock” projects when contract amendments for additional budgets are pending. Archiving is not useful to us until we have completed the project and the client has paid in full.
We are a marketing & design firm and a feature like this would be invaluable across multiple industries, but, especially in ours! It is frustrating to find that we are over budget on a project and I hope that a “lock project” option could be implemented shortly!
Perhaps you could just invoice that project out? You don’t need to send the invoice just create one. We will lock on the timeframe & project. Or another alternative would be to rename the project with loud [OVERBUDGET] name and rely on your employees to do the sensible thing.
Dee,
Thanks for the ideas.
Renaming projects isn’t a great option, because we use the project names for importing time into QuickBooks. We can’t have a possibility of a mismatch.
“Invoicing that project out” doesn’t work too well either, because we might want to delete and recreate the invoice, for various reasons (which would then requiring us to unarchive the project, which gets a little laborious).
Basically, I’d like to be able to distinguish between these use cases:
A) prevent users from working (logging time) on project
B) prevent managers from invoicing against a project
Right now, the “Archive” feature prevents both scenarios, but it doesn’t address the subtleties of preventing A, but allowing B.
Thanks,
Update: I just noticed that it now seems possible to invoice hours in an archived project — that’s GREAT! When this this get implemented? I’m totally going to start using this.
