[hermes] Proposed modifications to Hermes

[Jason M. Felice]

I've been requested to make a few modifications to Hermes to support our 
company better, and just want to post them here for comment before I begin.

There are two primary business requirements:

1) The ability to track time to project deliverables.
2) Reduce time involved in creating invoices.

The proposed modifications are:

1) Addition of a administrative screen for maintaining projects (per 
client) and deliverables (per project).
2) Addition of a screen to browse, view and reopen "Invoicing Reports" 
(see below)
3) Addition of a management "Invoicing Worksheet" screen which would:
  3a) Copy all submitted time to line items on the screen.  Line items 
would be backed by a different table than timeslices so that we have 
record of actual time worked versus time billed.
  3b) Allow the manager to add, delete, and edit invoice line items.
  3c) Allow the manager to check off individual line items and merge 
them.  This would total the hours, concatenate the notes, and 
consolodate the dates into a range.
  3d) Allow the manager to enter billing rates or line amounts for each 
line.
  3e) Allow the manager to "finalize" or "close" the worksheet when 
finished. (It then becomes a "report".)
4) Addition of a function to export an invoicing report to a QuickBooks 
import file.

I'm looking for feedback on this way of doing things.  I'm open to 
better ideas and would be willing to implement equivalent ways which 
serve more people's needs.

On the project/deliverable piece, projects and deliverables will not be 
required.  I'd considered integrating with Thor, but after some internal 
debate, I decided that I'm open to providing a driver to use Thor's 
objects, but I don't want to require a dependency on Thor just yet, 
especially because our requirements are very, very light (we only need 
project names and deliverable names).

-- 
 Jason M. Felice
 Cronosys, LLC <http://www.cronosys.com/>
 216.221.4600 x302