Bootcamp 2 - Manage Your Projects

In this second bootcamp we are looking at how Roll helps you better manage your projects and collaborate with your project team.

Overview:

1. Exploring your project view
2. Adding users to a project
3. Create, view and assign tasks

4. Track retainer work and repeating tasks
   

5. Track time
6. View and make notes

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1. Exploring your project view

First, lets take a closer look at the project view so you know where to find what and what it all means.

• Go to your project view by clicking on the project icon in the top left menu
• Select ‘In Progress’ from the left side options
• Open one of your projects or create a new one (check Bootcamp 1 to learn how to create new projects)
• The first half of the project info page should be pretty self-explanatory. This is where you enter all the basic project information. Note that you can create companies, job types and lead sources on the fly. Just type in the field and if it doesn’t already exist an ‘Add…’ option will show up.

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Pro Tip:

Check out the different tabs at the top of each project page for more details and features related to each project – more about each of them later in this bootcamp.

A few things that might need further clarification:

Financial summary:
This is where you enter the total value of the project. You also have the option to enter an estimated month end value. This is particularly useful for bigger projects that you invoice in several stages. By adding how much you’re expecting to invoice this month for each individual project you always have a good overview of how much you’re expecting to make this month – more about that in Bootcamp 4: Get full visibility.

How you’re tracking:
This shows you how much time and cost have been tracked against this project and how much is remaining based on the total project value you’ve entered. That way you can easily see how much time you and your team have spent on this project and if a project is at risk of running over budget.

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Pro Tip:

Both the financial summary and how you're tracking data can be extremely valuable for your business. Make sure you check out Bootcamp 4 to really understand how Roll helps you get visibility of your business.

2. Adding user to a project

As so many things in life, projects are often teamwork. And communication and access to information are key to successful teamwork. That’s why Roll makes it easy for you to add your team members and contractors to a project – so everyone has access to all the essential information.

First, you need to invite your team members or contractors to Roll.

• Go to your account settings by clicking the settings icon in the top right corner
• Select ‘Users’ from the left side options
• Click on the ‘Add User’ button at the top
• Enter their details and click ‘Add User’
• We will automatically send them an email with instructions on how to activate and set up their account.

Once your new user has activated their Roll account you can add them to projects.

• Open the project you want to add the user to
• On the Project Info tab about half way down you will see the Team. This should show you and everyone else that has already been added to the project team
• Click on the little + symbol next to the existing team members
• You will see a drop down with a list of all the users added to your Roll account. Simply select the one you want to add to this project. They will receive an email notification to let them know they’ve been added to the project.

3. Create, view and assign tasks

We all know how easily things get missed when we’re busy. Or how easily you double up on work because you weren’t clear on who is doing what. Roll’s simple task management feature makes it super easy for you to track all of your and your team’s tasks. So nothing gets missed and everyone knows who is doing what.

Here is how you create and assign tasks:

• Open the project you want to create tasks for
• Navigate to the tasks view by clicking on the tab in the top menu
• Click ‘Create Task’ and add your task
• Click on the three dots on the right for more options. This is where you can set due dates, assign team members, star tasks or delete them.

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Pro TIp

You can also create sub-tasks by clicking on the arrow that shows up on the right when you hover over a task and then clicking the + symbol

In this same view you can also see all task created for a project. Use the filter and search functions at the top to find tasks - for examples, those assigned to a specific team member.

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The My Tasks Area
If you want to view all tasks and not just those assigned to a specific project navigate to the My Tasks area via the top left menu (the icon with the tick box). Here you can see all of your tasks as well as all of your teams’ tasks (if you’re an admin user). You can easily see what is overdue and due soon so you are always focused on the right things and nothing gets missed.

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Pro Tip

In both the Tasks tab on the project view and the My Tasks page you can show/hide completed tasks. Simply click on the eye icon next to the search and filter fields.

4. Track retainer work and repeating tasks

You can now set up retainers and repeating projects and tasks in Roll, making it even easier and faster to keep track of your projects and tasks. Watch the video below to see how retainers work in Roll.

5. Track time

Now that you know what needs to be done you need to make sure you track your time so you can invoice your clients the correct amounts and make sure projects are complete within budget. As everything in Roll, time tracking is super simple. There are two ways to do it.

Start/Stop Timers
No matter where in Roll you are, you can always start the timer in a matter of seconds.

• Simply click the stop watch icon in the top right next to your name.
• Click ‘Start Time’ to start tracking time
• Select the project you want to track the time against
• Select the hourly rate from the dropdown (if you leave this blank the default rate will be applied)
• Click ‘Save’ to save your details. This will NOT stop the timer. But it will shrink the view and give you the option to start another timer (which would automatically pause the current one).

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Pro Tip:

You can pause and re-start timers and you can have several ‘active’ timers at the same time making it easy to switch between projects and tasks. If you start a new timer while another one if running the first timer will automatically be paused.

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Track time manually
You can also log time against a project manually, so if you need to log multiple days worth of time at once, no problem, you can do that with Roll.

• Open the project
• Navigate to the ‘Time’ tab in the top menu of the project page. Here you can see all the time that has been tracked for this project by each individual team member. Click on the arrow next to their names to see all the details.
• Click ‘Log new time’ to add time manually

6. View and make notes

A big part of project management is making sure everyone is on the same page and communicates information with the whole project team. That’s why Roll gives you the ability to add notes to projects – so you can share all your wisdom and ideas with your team and everything is in one, easily accessible, place.

• Open your project
• Navigate to the Notes tab in the top menu
• Add a note or reply to an existing one