Setting up projects and tasks

Every hour recorded in Temponia belongs to a project and a task. A project can belong to a client, tasks are defined once for the whole company and linked to the projects that use them, and people can only track time on projects they are assigned to.

It is worth setting this up deliberately. The structure you choose here is what your reports and invoices are grouped by later.

Create a client

Clients are optional. Internal work can sit on a project with no client, but a project needs a client before it can be invoiced.

1. Open Manage, then Clients, and select Create client.
2. Fill in the Name. Everything else is optional.
3. Add the E-mail if you send invoices from Temponia. It becomes the default recipient.
4. Prefer Street and number, Postal code and City over the free text Address (free text) field. Only the structured fields work for Peppol e-invoicing.

Create a project

1. Open Manage, then Projects, and select Create project.
2. Give it a Name. Names have to be unique within your company.
3. Pick the Client, or leave the field empty.
4. Pick a Color. It is what identifies the project across timesheets and charts.
5. Choose a Billing type, a Billable setting and a Budget. These are covered in Billing types, Rates and Budgets.
6. Select Create project.

You land on the project's edit page, where you add people and tasks. That page has no save button: each field is stored as soon as you change it or move away from it.

Add tasks

Tasks belong to the company, not to one project. You create them once under Manage, then Tasks, with Create task, and reuse them everywhere.

Two settings on a task matter beyond its name:

• Common means "newly created projects will have this task assigned by default". Making a task common also links it to every active project you already have.
• Billable off means time on that task is never given a price, on any project, whatever rates are configured.

On the project's edit page, the Project's tasks panel lists the tasks that project uses. Pick one from the dropdown and select Add task, or select remove to take one off. Removing keeps the history: the link is deactivated, past entries stay where they are.

You can work from the other side too. On Manage, then Tasks, open a task and use Link task to projects to tick every project that should have it.

Assign people

In the Users assigned panel, choose a person and select Assign. Whoever creates a project is assigned to it automatically.

• PM marks a project manager. Project managers receive the budget alert e-mails, and a user with the manager role can edit the projects they are PM on.
• DR and Rate / hour only appear when the project's Billable setting is By person rate.
• Budget hours and Budget amount only appear when the budget is per person.
• unassign deactivates the assignment and keeps the tracked time.

Someone who is not assigned does not see the project at all when entering time. That is the control: assignments decide who can log against what.

Archive, restore and delete

Projects are archived first, not deleted.

1. On Manage, then Projects, use Archive project in the Manage column. The project moves out of the active list.
2. It reappears under Archived projects at the bottom of the same page.
3. Restore puts it back in the active list.
4. Permanently delete is the second action on an archived project. It warns that deleting also removes related items and prevents you from seeing any history.

Archiving a client hides its projects too. A project whose client is archived drops out of active lists and out of the task lists people pick from, even though the project itself is still marked active. Restore the client to bring them back.

On the free plan you can keep two active projects and one active client. Restoring is blocked while that would take you over the limit, and a project cannot be restored while its client is still archived. See your subscription.

What a well-structured project looks like

• A short task list, reused across projects. Mark the handful of tasks you use everywhere as Common and keep project-specific tasks rare, so reports stay comparable.
• One person marked PM, so budget alerts have somewhere to go.
• A client set on anything you intend to invoice.
• A Billing type that matches the agreement you actually made, rather than the way you happen to record time.
• Only the people doing the work assigned to it.