How can a manager configure a staffer profile?
Configuring Capacity and Salaries
How to Configure a Part-Time Work Contract
Setting Up Contracts of Freelancers
Setting Up a Staffer’s Cost Rate
Checking Employee’s Capacity in BigTime
Managers or administrators can use BigTime Foresight’s resource management capabilities to assign staff skills, manage time off requests, and make more strategic allocation decisions. Every staffer added to Foresight has a profile where their contact information, experience, time off history, and other personal details are stored. Because they have management authority, administrators and managers can edit these details and add new ones to a staffer’s profile. Managers can also potentially have the ability to submit time off requests on behalf of staffers. Here, we’ll explain how managers can add, edit, or otherwise configure basic profile details for their staffers in Foresight.
| NOTE: Depending on the user rights they’ve been granted, employees may be able to edit certain data on their profiles. Look at this article to learn how user rights affect the Foresight experience. Also, note that here, "employees" means "staffers." For a full list of Foresight-specific terminology and definitions, look at the BigTime Foresight Glossary. |
How can a manager configure a staffer profile?
To add experience, technical and soft skills, or languages to an employee’s profile, go to the TEAM MEMBERS tab from your main navigation sidebar. Then, open the profile for a specific employee and click on the PROFILE tab. You’ll see some fields you can edit. Here, you can add:
- information about the staffer's position, seniority, and time-off manager;
- staffer's contracts,
- experience, e.g. info from past project work, key responsibilities, and history of skills;
- education;
- certificates;
- technical and soft skills;
- language skills
| NOTE: Adding technical skills to a team member’s profile will help you when searching for specialists to add to a project. |
There are two differences between employees and managers. As a manager, you can create skill categories. Employees cannot create new skill categories and can only add skills from a category created by a manager. Moreover, managers can add seniority levels, while employees cannot. Remember that your whole organization will see categories of skills and seniorities. To create a new category of skills or seniority for your whole company, go to the MY COMPANY navigation sidebar tab. Clicking between the tabs at the top of this window will allow you to add different skills/skill categories, time off types, and seniorities.
Configuring Capacity and Salaries
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Log in to the Manager Account ➡ Go to the Team Members Tab ➡ Find the right Staffer ➡ Go to the Contracts Section ➡ Add New Contract / Edit existing one
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Before planning people's work or estimating projects, you’ll want to configure each team member's capacity and salary information.
To configure this information on a staffer profile, log into Foresight as a manager and go to the TEAM MEMBERS tab in your primary navigation sidebar.
Next, go to the SETTINGS tab and find the WORK row, which allows you to set up:
- Capacity, or the number of hours per day and working days a staffer is assigned. Skipping public holidays means that Foresight will not take these holidays into account when calculating capacity
- Duration of the Contract - Contract Start Date and Contract End Date
- Title of the contract
- Cost Rate (the rate we charge the client for the work of a given employee)
To add a new contract or change an existing one, click on the specific cell for that contract and fill in the fields in its SETTINGS window.
How to Configure a Part-Time Work Contract
The challenge with part-time contractors is that it is difficult to predict when the part-time job will be completed. To avoid calculation errors in the system, follow good practices:
- Set your staffer's capacity for four hours per weekday.
- Set rules with the staffers so that they work the appropriate number of hours each week. Reports showing those hours will not be affected regardless of how many days it takes them to work those hours.
- When generating reports, use at least weekly granularity. We do not recommend daily report granularity for two reasons. Firstly, in the case of contractors, the financial data on the report will have a large margin of error. Secondly, the perspective must be more comprehensive for your report to be helpful.
Setting Up Contracts of Freelancers
When you hire part-time contracted staffers, you’ll need to know precisely how many hours they’ll work. Their hours aren’t regular like those of a full-time staffer. We recommend using BigTime Foresight to settle freelancers for the number of hours they worked.
On the other hand, when measuring the utilization of our employees in the UTILIZATION report, we often do not consider contractors at all. Again, this is because they work on an as-needed basis, and we don’t need to plan their hours the same way we would with full-time staffers.
When setting up contractor staffer profiles in BigTime Foresight, label your new staffer as a freelance contractor. Doing so will allow you to exclude them from the UTILIZATION REPORT. These fields will allow you to do this:
- Default Roles
- Seniority
- Title
- Department
Setting Up a Staffer’s Cost Rate
When setting up the cost rate for a staffer, you should enter the rate that reflects that staffer’s total actual costs for the company. If your company incurs any tax expenses in connection with this staffer’s work, you’ll need to include this tax in the staffer's Cost Rate to calculate the total cost of their work.
Checking Employee’s Capacity in BigTime
Once you configure the capacity staffer in BigTime Foresight, you can view this information in BigTime. To do this, follow the following path:
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Click MY COMPANY Tab ➡ Go to the STAFF LIST Section ➡ Find and click
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