Projects

Hi Shaz - I responded to you earlier today on the other forum post that I started regarding this issue. Many thanks for your help,

DG

Hi CJ & Derek,

I've escalated this to the development team, however I can confirm the open projects tab is misleading as it displays all projects whether it is archived, closed or open. I will keep you posted on this forum once something concrete has been made from the development team.

Sorry for the inconvenience,

@Derek, please can you confirm that all the close projects in your account have now been archived?

Thanks,

Shaz

What's not to like in this view? :)

I have entered the start and finish dates for four of my projects but when I press the Open projects button I get the following grid reproduced below which lists the projects names on the left and months at the bottom. There are no figures in the grid. Shouldn't I be getting the original list of Projects filtered to include Open ones only ?

Hi Shaz - just noticed you'd completed the archiving of projects for me - thanks very much as this is now allowing me to view only my open projects (with the 'show archived projects' unchecked)

Appreciated.

Cheers< DG

Appreciated. DG

Hi Derek,

No worries, I'll have all the closed ones archived for you ASAP and notify you on this post once it has been done.

Kind Regards,

Shaz

I was going to ask if there was any way you would be able to in the backend of the tables mark all my closed projects as archived?

It's definitely all closed projects that need to be marked archived. If you were able to do this it would certainly help.

Thanks, DG

Hi Derek,

If you're sure that it's all the closed projects that you want archived then I can, if you wish, archive them all for you manually so it takes the burden of your hands?

Thanks,

Shaz

Thanks Shaz.

The only way I can see fixing this so I can continue to work in the meantime is to go through my 780 or so projects that are closed and mark them as archived so I can use the toggle (include archived projects or not) on the All Projects View so I'm just left with Open Projects. This is going to take me a long time, but I can't continue on a daily basis to wade through all my projects just to get to open projects

DG

Hi Derek,

This seems like it was a design flaw where it was set up to render a retrospective report of completed projects as opposed to one for projection or forecast purposes. I've escalated this to the development to review the purpose of this feature and I will update you once I have heard back from them.

I'd like to thank you for your patience.

Kind Regards,

Shaz

Hi Shaz - I've entered an end date for the above project now.

When I go to open projects and enter a date range, Yes, I can now see a green bar along the bottom.

This tells me the project is open - I can't, however, view or edit the project from this view - so this does not really help.

It seems counter intuitive to me that in order to view an open project you have to at the point of creating the project enter the actual end date. You do not know this date until the project reaches the point where it is no longer open and you want to close it or archive it?

It is not possible to know the actual end date of a project when it is created - hence you put in an estimated date.

We, as a software development company, cannot understand the logic of this and why it is not possible to make a simple list view of all open projects available - our programmers could do this in 30 mins.

I look forward to your response, Derek

Hi Derek,

I can confirm that there needs to be a start date which I see you have for 'AG - Phone System Maintenance 2014' and the end date, but the end date needs to be entered for the actual end date and not the estimated one. I hope that answers your query.

All the best,

Shaz

Just to clarify - I've now gone back and added the start and end dates retrospectively and they do not show up. I've also created a brand new project with a start and end date and that does not show up either!

I do understand your difficulties with this. However, in order for them to display on the open project tab you will have to include the start and actual end dates.

CJ, I have had a look and the project for which you included the start and actual dates does actually show up if you expand the date parameters. So, this does in fact seem to work. I can see 100 club Draw 2014/15 in the open projects tab. If you include those elements you will be able to see them.

Derek, I have checked with my manager and, unfortunately, I have been informed that there is no way around this and you can only see the projects whern these details have been filled in. I am sorry for any difficulties or confusion that this may cause.

Many Thanks

Chris

Here Here Derek

!! Although I only have a handful of projects open at a time the number of closed and archived ones increases yearly and so it is useful to be able to easily select the open ones which are the ones I am likely to need to update.

I reiterate my recent comment when I said it would be useful for the system to initially only display a list of currently open ones with the option to display closed and archive ones. It seems a bit illogical to me the way it is set up.

I concur with CJ - I've not been in the habit of entering start and end dates of projects as the only thing important to me is to be able to view/ edit open projects and either delete them or archive them once they are complete.

I've got some 800 or so projects in the system - the date issue is a bit of a side issue here. Surely the flag you assign to the project (open, deleted or archived) should determine the status of a project and not the start date or end date.

If the Open projects tab was intended to show not only open projects but also projects that are scheduled? (i.e. projects that are created and by definition OPEN) then why do none of my projects appear in the Open Projects list as they are Open and now have a start date and end date entered?

If the date issue here is crucial to Clearbooks in terms of running queries to display lists based on project status then surely these should be made mandatory fields. Sadly, even if this was the case, it would appear that entering a start date and end date on a project does not make it appear Open.

This seems inherently flawed and it will take more than a renaming of the tab to make this work the way it should. I don't know what the logic was in making these recent changes, but the product has taken a real step back and is now not fit for purpose.

I find it hard to believe that these 'features' are not DEV tested before they are let loose on your SaaS customers - this recent Project 'enhancement' simply does not work and does not make logical sense. I cannot be expected to trawl through 800 current projects to find my open projects and this is going to get worse as I add about 10-20 new projects every month. Surely it's not too much to ask to be able to filter projects by status?

I'm sorry but it still doesn't work even after entering start and estimated end dates in the schedule. On pressing the open projects button I get the message " No Data to Display" whether or not I have entered start and end dates in that window.

I tested it also by entering a finished date in the schedule instead of an estimated date but then I get an empty grid with the name of the project at bottom left and a couple of small boxes top right labelled "Actual" and "Overflow" Along the bottom of the grid are shown the months covered by the project from and to dates.

This is driving me crazy!

Hi CJ,

I do understand your frustration with this and that it requires extra work. However, as long as there are dates included then I it will show the correct. Furthermore, I have also been informed that the Open Projects tab was never intended to show only open project, but in fact should display all current projects which have been scheduled. We will look at a change of name in this case too so that it is a little less misleading. I am sorry if you were not informed of any changes which were taking place, but we are constantly looking to develop and improve our software for our users.

Chris

I have never bothered to include start and end dates as it wasn't necessary for my purposes. Under the previous way of selecting open projects this wasn't necessary as open projects could be easily selected by choosing the open option from the drop down menu. Why can't you organise it to be similar as before as this means more work for us and is somewhat of a pain. ? The other galling thing about all this is that you make these changes without, as far as I can see, telling your customers in advance and we then discover we can't use the system as we used to and to make matters worse it doesn't always work anyway !

Hi CJ and Derek,

I believe that this issue is caused by the fact that your open projects do not have start and end dates filled in. These seem to have been left blank in all your open projects. In order for them to show up in the open projects tab you will have to go into each open project and edit them so that they include start and end dates. I believe that this will resolve the issue for you.

Many Thanks

Chris

Thank you, I look forward to early correction of this issue as it has wasted a lot of my time.

Hi,

I have found the 'Deleted' project status issue when it should be archived. This is a display issue only and does not affect the projects themselves. It is something our developers will work on to correct.

We are still looking into why Open Projects do not show up and cannot be selected.

Chris

I said yesterday in my message that Open projects did not appear even when 'from and to' dates were entered.

Hi CJ and Derek,

Please can you give me a little more information please? From what I can see there is an Open Projects tab, which needs to have a date range specified. Are you saying that even when a date range is specified that nothing appears in the list?

Chris

I've also raised this issue - I have a number of open projects - none of these are listed under the open projects view. When I try to use the date range option and choose any combination of periods, it displays nothing.

I use this feature all the time and now the only way for me to get to me open projects is to use the all projects view and scroll through all 50 pages of my projects (displayed alphabetically) to get to the project I wish to edit or view. This is a major issue for me as I use projects every single day and this enforced workaround is taking me far to long to do something that used to take me seconds.

It's not really acceptable that it's taken at least 5 days from the point of reporting this to get no update on the issue and when it's to be fixed. It's a major issue for anyone that uses projects and unless it's fixed quickly I'm afraid I'll be forced to jump ship and look elsewhere for our Cloud Accounting software as I can't work much longer with this problem.

Yes, we do have Open projects which used to be listed when using the previous drop down option.

Hi CJ,

So, to confirm, you definitely have Open projects which should be shown in the list? I have not personally seen the issue regarding the 'deleted' projects on the test account so i will have to look into that one a little further for you.

Chris

Hi Chris, Thank you for that but when you click on the Open Tab you get a message " No Data To Display" whether or not I enter from and to dates.
I cannot therefore show only "open" projects. I understand your point about the "archived" projects which will be shown when the "include archived" box is ticked but you have not commented on my point that "archived projects" are elsewhere described as "deleted " which is misleading.

Hi CJ

When you go into projects and search you will see Open/Closed projects in the All tab and only Open ones in the open tab. the system does not display the archived projects by default. To see these you will have to tick the box on the all [page which says 'include archived'. That should give you the full list for you to view.

Chris