Project of the Month - March 2007

SugarTime

Description of project

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

I've found that SugarCRM is rock solid. Just knowing that makes delivering custom solutions so much easier because you trust it's is going to work for your customer day after day. There are also a lot of people in the SugarCRM community that are willing to help out. I wouldn't have been able to get this project off the ground if it wasn't for things like sugarwiki and people like Ken Brill writing articles and posting on the forum. I've also been so blown away by the response to SugarTime; I never thought it would get such reaction.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

SugarTime is my first Sugar component.

What inspired you to create this project?

I designed it based on our needs at Everyday Interactive (ein.com.au). With a growing staff we needed to something better than paper timesheets. We wanted the information to be accessible via our intranet (Sugar) and able to be imported into our accounting system without needing extra data entry. We were pretty sure we're not alone in needing this. We thought it would be useful for some of our Sugar clients as well. So one of the principles in my design is to make it so I can easily extend it to suit specific client needs but keep the core simple for everyone else.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

We were aiming to replace an awkward paper-based timesheets system. With the old method, the information required additional data entry and was difficult to access because it was locked up in the business accounts system with limited access. My aim was to create a lightweight component that has a clean interface and is fast and easy to use. The benefit of SugarTime that people may underestimate is that because SugarTime is such an easy-to-use component, it saves on the time required for staff training. That, along with the time saved in information accessibility, easy auditing and the reduction in duplicated data entry, adds up to big savings for a business over time.

Is there anything that the users should know about those? Something hidden/new in these modules? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

Entering a new time record is designed to be simple and requires only a few clicks. For example the user can leave the "Date" field blank and SugarTime will automatically record it as the today's date. Also, a user can enter a time as "10:00" or simply "10" and SugarTime will format it correctly. For listing time records, users can filter it by multiple users and a date range, so it's easy to see, for example, what hours Joe worked last week.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Just go for it! The SugarCRM community is everything open source business application community should be. I think there's scope for greater participation. There needs to be more developers creating tools and then providing professional customisation services. SugarCRM appeals to businesses and they need professional support. Open source is a great model for smaller development teams like EIN.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

I'm already working on my next project "SugarBill", which is the next step up from SugarTime aimed at capturing staff time billing. This module will let you record billed hours to projects, accounts, tasks and just about any other module. I'm really looking forward to its first release.