Timesheet Next Gen allows you to record the hours of employees and contractors across multiple projects. Its interface is simple, yet powerful and requires no training.

The application is completely web-based, which makes it accessible from anywhere in the world. Combine this with the flexible time zone configuration options and you can track hours worked by people across multiple countries if required.

TimesheetNG allows extensive customization from within the administration interface itself, through the use of html templates and css to make the software look like your company's own. Its administration features automatically calculate reports and invoices from time sheet information entered by multiple users for multiple projects.

Users can clock-on and clock-off at the click of a button, or manually manage and update time and tasks. The calendar view allows the user to easily view weekly and monthly totals for particular projects, and show overall work patterns for all projects.

TimeSheetNG can be downloaded from SourceForge download page.

Product Features

• Easy to use
• Client, User, Project, and Task management
• Calendar view of work, grouped by project or all projects
• Monthly, weekly or daily views of work
• Easily customizable look and feel
• Work periods spanning multiple days (yes, we work hard)
• Automatic calculation of invoices and reports
• Manual clock-on/clock-off maintenance
• Administrator views and reports
• Time zone adjustment for use on international servers

• The focus of this project ease of use, functionality and extendibility relating to the tasks involved with handling TimeSheets.
• TimesheetNG targets the activity of enterening and tracking time, based on projects and tasks.
• TimesheetNG is written in PHP, uses MySQL as backend, and standard WebBrowser as frontend.
• Project WorkFlow and business rules vary between companies and markets. TimeSheetNG aims at being customizable and adaptable to integrating various Work Flow strategies and Business Rules. Providing a flexible, easy and safe way to handle timesheets.

• An easy way to enter time spent
• Input to Accounting systems and invoicing
• Documentation for clients
• Input to Project Control (QA and QC)

• Project Planning/Management system
• Accounting system
• CRM system
• Change or bug management system

• Bearing in mind that TimesheetNG targets the actual task of handling timesheets… From a Workflow perspective one could say that TimeSheetNG will get its actual Project and Task information from a Project Planning System, and present its output to Project Progress, Accounting, Invoicing and payroll systems.
• When planning such a system, it is very easy to forget the main target of the system, by overloading it with features that are a natural part of other systems like mentioned above.

Possible points of Integration..

• User Information (CRM or other)
• Client information (CRM or other)
• Project and task definitions (Project Management Systems)

• CRM systems
• Project Management Systems
• Accounting Systems
• Payroll Systems

A lot of probable extensions are mentioned in the wish lists, found in Mantis System

The core functionality of TimesheetNG should be that of time tracking. TimeSheetNG could easily become bogged down with trying to be a fully fledged PM system and this defeats the purpose - besides, there are many great PMSs out there already.

I think this project could turn into a “killer app” the moment when it realises this! This project should be about the core functionality of being a really easy-to-use method for entering time spent on a particular task. This is worth saying again: recording time spent on tasks.

Once we have this core then we can expand the focus on two things:

 1. Integration into existing PM and workflow solutions - dotProject, Mantis, Bugzilla even???
 2. Developing plugins to extend the core functionality - reporting, sick days, etc.

If we successfully “pull off” point 1 we don't have to worry about how tasks break down into “client/project/tasks”, it could even be “projects/versions/bugs” for all TimesheetNG cares, as long as it accurately and easily tracks the time users spend working on whatever it is.

On top of this, if we can develop some really good plugins to integrate into the above then TimesheetNG could become a really useful little tool.

I'm not sure how these thought will be taken in via the community using the current Timesheet.php project, but then again, this is a separate project?! Timesheet.php should be seen as a subset of TimesheetNG functionality, so anyone who uses 1.2.1 should lose nothing (and gain everything) by upgrading.

Thoughts please — Rob Searles 2008/02/11 00:40