Setup Internal Projects and Activities

It is useful to record time spent on all activities in a business not just project related activities. This allows deep analysis of where time and money is being spent in a business and identifies productivity or inefficiency issues that can be addressed.

In order to do this, you should create projects and related activities to cover all business tasks, not just project related activities. This can include items such as recruitment, finance, payroll, personnel management, administration, training, meetings etc. It is recommended to create these activities under a suitable project, eg all HR related activities could be under a HR project.

You can create projects and activities from the Projects page. This is described here. For these "non-project" activities you should set the Project Type to be Management. If you want to restrict logging time against these activities to certain individuals, add them as Resources onto the project and set the Restrict To Team option to be true. If you want to be able to schedule time against these activities (rather than just enter actuals) then set the Enable Schedule option to be true.

Once these projects and activities are created they are available for scheduling time and for recording actuals in a timesheet

Project - Activity Taxonomy

It is worth early on working out the "taxonomy" of internal and management projects and their associated activities that are appropriate to your organisation. We would recommend at least one management project for each function in your organisation, such as HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing. You can then define activties for each of these at the granularity at which you want to record and schedule time. We would recommend no more than 12 activities per project so it remains manageable.