There are 2 kinds of milestone projects
- Legacy Milestone Projects
- New Milestone Projects
In this document, we will focus on setting up a Legacy Milestone project in iBE.net system. The principle is to add new Milestone tasks for billing and use legacy tasks for time sheets. Then we group them together by phases to be able to report by milestones.
A Milestone price project has a defined revenue at the completion of certain tasks. It's not billed by the hours and irrespective of hours spent we can only charge a pre-defined fixed amount at the completion of the milestone. There are few specific inputs required to set up such projects. This document will focus on those specific set up.
Key Info Tab - Project Type Set up
In this case, besides the usual information like Description, Project Leader, Customer, start - end dates etc., use Project Type as "Billable- Milestone".
Milestone Tab: Create Milestones
In this tab we will define all the milestones at the completion of which a bill can be raised.
Go to Milestone Tab to maintain all the Milestones, their start & end dates, Service and Milestone amount that you can bill at the end of the milestone.
Make sure Phases are set to be "Based on Milestone". We will use phases to group the Billing Milestones with Legacy timesheet tasks later during the set up.
Start adding all the Milestones for billing.
- Milestone = Name of Milestone
- Start = Start date of Milestone
- End = End date of the milestone
- Service = Always use "Project Services - Milestone" for this kind of project.
- Planned Qty will auto populate with 1 Billing milestone. Do not change it.
- Amount = Amount to be billed at the end of Milestone. Do not include tax in this amount.
If you don't find any of the above fields in the grid, you can add them in the grid by clicking on the down arrow of any column heading.
Task Tab
All the Milestones created in the previous step will appear as Tasks in Tasks Tab. You will also see a bunch of tasks uploaded from the legacy system. Legacy tasks already have the resources allocated on them. System has also created "phases" with the same name as "Milestone Task".
- Bind Legacy and Milestone task with Phases - Each milestone tasks can be associated with one or more legacy tasks depending on how legacy tasks were set up in replicon. Identify the tasks that you want to group together for reporting purposes. Once you identify them, assign phases to group them together.
- Resource Allocation : Do not assign any resources to the Billing milestone tasks. Only allocate resources to the Legacy tasks if resources are not already allocated or need modification. You can allocate resources from the Task grid by clicking on the drop down for the resources and then select each resource one by one from the drop down. Click on done at the end of selection of the resources.
- You can also allocate resources from the task details screen. Specially if you want to put planned hours by resources. To open the task detail screen, click on the pencil icon at the right corner of the grid row for that task. it will open a screen like below. Go to Resource tab and there you can add / remove resources as well as put planned hours by resources.
SAVE THE PROJECT AND YOUR PROJECT IS READY TO BOOK TIME AND BILL.
Remember: A resource can not book time on a task till its is not assigned to the task as well as it can only book time on and after the start date of the task. So be careful while setting up the task dates and resource allocations.