The Onboarding process

When you first start using Forecastify, you will be greeted by our Onboarding mechanism. It serves to allow you to set things up quickly in an easy to use and streamlined fashion. The process has the following steps:

The API key (of your external project management tool, like Jira or Youtrack)

We will use this to connect to the tool you already use, and import whatever we can from it, saving you the hassle of reentering the data

Your access levels

Forecastify comes with a fully configurable access management system, allowing fine-grained control over who can see what in the application

At this stage we provide you with a set of sensible defaults, leaving the details for when you can already access the full application

Your user attributes

Forecastify strives to be a single source of truth for your organization’s employees, complete with their role, department and competencies

You will be able to define your own possibilities for each of these categories, and you can already do so here

Your chosen currency

Forecastify works best if you set a single currency that your organization uses for its internal elszámolás

Your employee’s tiers and their rates

Forecastify uses a slightly abstract system to track your employees’ wages and additional costs

In this system, employees are organized into tiers, and each tier has a specific hourly rate associated with it

You can set up your initial tiers and costs here. Don’t worry, all of this can be fine-tuned later

Your users

Every employee whose work is tracked in your organization should have an account in Forecastify

At first, all we need is a name and email address to allow the accounts to be set up, we will attempt to gather this information from the initial synchronization

Setting up your users

At this point you are able to associate all the different attributes to your users.

The only requirement at this point is to have at least one all-powerful admin user selected, everything else can be skipped

However, we encourage you to use the available batch selection and configuration tools to quickly set roles and privileges, titles and competencies, tiers and costs of your users here

Your clients

In order to help with categorizing your projects right from the start, you can add your main clients here

Your projects

Your projects will be imported from the initial synchronization

Depending on how far your records go back, the import may include a staggering amount of projects. Don’t worry, you can choose which ones you want to actually add to Forecastify, filtering them by date as well

In order to show you basic budgeting and forecasting information, we must have a few core attributes of your projects, which you can add here

Don’t worry, any and all project information can be changed or added later

The initialization procedure

Once you complete the last screen of the Onboarding process, Forecastify will begin a full synchronization with your Project Management tool. Usually these APIs have a rate limit, so based on the amount of users and especially projects, tickets and timesheet entries you have, this may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. You won’t be able to access the system during this period, since there are no guarantees we could show you up to date information until the process completes.

When the synchronization is complete and all internal entities have been initialized, all your admin users will receive a notification about accessing the system.

First steps within Forecastify

How much usable information we can show you the very first time you log in, depends on how well you have filled out everything during the Onboarding process. In the following steps we will show you what you can do to get the most out of Forecastify

Regarding your employees

Work schedules

All of your employees are set up to have a standard work week of 8 hrs on each weekday

Forecastify will use this information to determine if your employees have logged the appropriate amount of hours each day

If you have employees who work less than 40 hrs per week, you can should make these changes to their work schedules

Teams

A powerful organizational tool within Forecastify is the ability to create teams for your employees, complete with their resource or financial lead

Resource leads will be responsible for approving absence requests and resource allocation within our system

Financial leads will be able to see financial details and summaries of your employees and their projects

We didn’t want to stack this onto the onboarding process, so at the start there will be no teams set up

Setting the teams up will allow the absence requests, resource allocation system to work better, and grant access to dedicated dashboards for your team leads

Tiers and Rates

In order to dial in your costs correctly, your employees need to be in the correct tier, and the tier needs to correct rate to be associated with it

Your employees likely won’t have exactly the same wages even if they are in the same role, and also, you should account for additional overheads like your office rental and similar upkeep costs

For the best way to calculate your tiers and rates, refer to this article in our knowledge base

Roles, departments, external users

All employees appreciate if the management system they are a part of accurately reflects their role in your organization

You should take the time to set up all the possible user attributes, like role, seniority and departments, along with competencies and privileges - and then associate your employees with them

If you allow external contractors to directly access your Project Management tool and timesheet into your systems, you should set them up as external within user management. This will allow you to more closely monitor their contributions and can even set an entirely customized rate for them

Regarding your projects

Unfortunately, setting up your projects correctly is the most time consuming, yet also the most important part of configuration. After the onboarding process, the system only has a vague idea about the structure of your projects, so let’s delve into what you can do to get the most out of Forecastify

Project types

Forecastify differentiates between Normal, Support and Outsource projects

This is crucial, since these three types have completely different screens (and entities under the hood) associated with them

To determine what type best represents your projects, refer to this article in our knowledge base

Milestones, Contracts and etc

In Forecastify, the basic building block of the financial module is not a project, but it’s sub-entity, like a Milestone

After the onboarding process, all of your projects will be of Normal type, and contain a single all-encompassing milestone within them

If you wish to see more fine-grained information and breakdowns, take the time to set up your projects’ milestones. This includes breaking your project up into smaller pieces, heavily dependent on their type.

All timesheets from your Project Management tool will be collected under milestones, and then summarized into projects, which allows you to track progress more accurately

Billing

Forecastify has the ability to track invoices and their status

To save time, we have completely skipped this step during the onboarding process, but if your projects already have billed or billable milestones, you should add these to the system

Miscellaneous

Forecastify’s project entities can store much more information about your projects than their name and a few numbers

For clarity, and to make full use of the system, you should take the time to fill out the details of your projects

Tickets, Estimates, Timesheets, etc

These are always synchronized from your Project Management tool, so you don’t need to do anything in Forecastify

When you first start using Forecastify, you might find that things are changing rapidly in the source system. Forecastify will automatically synchronize during the night, but you can find buttons on all relevant screens to perform this on demand, so you can see the effect of your changes immediately

Regarding resource allocation

Resource management, utilization

To save time, we have completely skipped this step during the onboarding process, but as an extra layer of planning and control, you can allocate your employees and teams to specific projects

Setting this up for the past is only relevant if you were already doing this in some way, in an Excel sheet for example. In this case, it might be a good idea to move that information into Forecastify, so you can allow it to summarize and report how well your organization adhered to your plans

Setting this up for the future provides much the same benefit as doing it for the past, and of course, will help the system identify problems or action items even from one day to the next, highlighting if your employees are not well utilized, or haven’t actually been working on what they were allocated to

Regarding financial planning and forecasting

Yearly Planning

To save time, we have completely skipped this step during the onboarding process, and depending on when you start using Forecastify within your financial year, you might wait with setting this up, using it mainly for your upcoming years and quarters

This feature gives a birds eye view of your company’s finances, leads and plans, while also providing you with dashboards and summaries of your past performance in relation to your original planning

This is a self-contained functionality, data from these plans do not appear elsewhere in Forecastify, since they wouldn’t be relevant

Regarding the absence tracking system

Absences

You can track your employees’ absence requests and holidays within Forecastify

This isn’t strictly required, but will help the system to more closely model and calculate your organization’s performance

You have full control over what kind of absences you want to differentiate, their quotas and etc

You can set up “Special Days” like national holidays and such that your organization observes too