Getting Some Data to Work With in TSR
You’ve just installed TSR and followed the guide, Getting Started, and are ready to use TSR, but would like some more data in the system.
You can of course do this on a continuous basis, but initially here are the steps you should follow to get some more data in TSR.
You can of course skip any step, which is not relevant to you.
Make sure that you have first read and followed
Getting Started, and also familiarized yourself with the terms used (
Glossary).
User Setup
If you have the trial on just need a single user, you can probably skip this section. If you need more users, please go over the following step-by-step.
These define what users can do with the system, so you might want a role for Administrators, one for Management, etc.
This guide shows you how to manage and create roles:
Roles.
Create the users, who should be using TSR and remember to give them a relevant role (see above):
Create TSR users.
Your user groups are, as the name indicate, for grouping users. You may have a group called ‘Management’, ‘IT admin’, ‘Staff’, etc. You use these groups for example when creating projects to select who should be able to report hours on a specific project, approve hours, etc.
This guide will show you how to manage and create user groups:
User groups.
Setting Up Projects, etc.
The trial version of TSR already comes with a project that you can track time on. If you wish to create more projects and corresponding organizations, please follow these steps.
To be able to report time on an organization (step 5), you also need to set up a project that uses that organisation (step 9).
After having set up your initial data, you may be able to skip step 6 and 8 (and sometimes 5), depending on your situation.
Create some organizations. This could be your clients, your own organization, partners, etc. Please follow this guide:
Organizations.
Activity types are used to sort between different types of activities. This especially helpful when generating reports, exporting data, etc. Two classic examples of activity types could be ‘Billable hours’ and ‘Non-billable hours’. This guide shows you how:
Activity types.
These activities are used for your projects and can be used across projects, meaning that you don’t have to create the same activity (for example ‘Meeting’) over and over again for your different projects. Examples could be ‘Client meeting’, ‘Creating newsletter’, ‘Research’, etc. The activities will be using the types you just created.
See here how to create activities:
Activities.
This is more or less the same as with Activity Types, and is for sorting projects. Again, very useful when drawing reports or exporting data. Two typical examples could be ‘Internal Projects’ and ‘Client Projects’. However, as with activity types, it’s up to you how you would like to structure this data. How to do this:
Project types.
Finally create some projects for the organizations you just created, and which will be using the activities you created above. Make sure that you select ‘User Groups’ and ‘Activities’ when creating the projects, and make sure that your users are in the relevant user groups.
On how to create projects, please see this:
Create Projects.
Advanced – Importing Data
You can also import data to TSR via TSR DataBridge, using CSV files. This is described here:
TSR DataBridge. However, to get started well with the system, and until you’ve familiarized yourself with it, we recommend that you do the above first, to get a good feeling for how things work.
That is basically it. You should now have some data to work with in TSR.
Enjoy!
