🏷️Using assignments
Assignments are at the heart of Zipwire and help you organise everyone.
The client assignment is a named bundle of configuration, including the details of several groups of people.
Who will be sending timesheets.
Who they will be sending them to for approval.
Who will process them.
In future, we think it'd be cool to let you add the people in Accounts Payable at your client so they can login to Zipwire and directly see the timesheets they're being billed for, and maybe even add payment functionality.
We're also considering letting you specify who within your workplace might manage the account.
The assignment also holds the billing plan which holds rules around the billable time units, and all the rates senders are paid for work associated with this assignment, stored in the rate plan.
Assignments are logical children of your clients.
Teams
The groups of approvers and processors are arranged into teams. You tell the assignment which team will do the approving or processing.
This is not the case for senders which are not placed into teams. The senders are linked directly to the assignment.
You can therefore switch the team which is approving, or processing. This also means you can setup a single processing team for your back-office people and put this team on all assignments. When you have a new joiner in the back-office, they only need to be added to the single processing team and they will see timesheets from all assignments.
Or you might setup a general processing team, plus another dedicated team for a particular assignment or client.
As you can see, it is very flexible.
Assigned activities
You can add activities to the assignment and they'll be pushed out to all the senders so that when they add journal entries, they will see the activity.
Assigned activities are pre-linked to the assigned workflow so the sender will not have to manually link it. See sending your first timesheet.
This feature makes it simpler for a sender to get started tracking time. It's often used where the activity name carries information like a cost-center ID which could be incorrectly entered (or missed) by the sender.
Keep in mind that senders can still create their own activities and link them to your assigned workflow. There's no feature in Zipwire to prevent a workflow from having user-made activities linked to it.
When to make a new assignment
The need for a new assignment should arise naturally because any existing one either has the wrong name, or is for a different client, but in general, assignments are focused around the senders and their manager(s).
Typically, an assignment represents a group of people working for a particular boss.
Assignments can have many billing plans configured. Each sender can use a particular billing plan, which is set in the rate plan. This means you can have a single assignment but differing billing.
However, a new assignment can be used whenever you need to split the configuration in some way, perhaps because the contact details are different across two groups of senders, or their hiring manager.
You can also split an assignment to solve more unusual situations. For example, if you have different pay or charge rates depending upon the work, then you can create two assignments each with an assigned activity which describes the work.
Remember that activity names can be any text, including shift times, or cost centers.
Watch out! If you have a sender in two different assignments for the same client, then you will need to remember to change their rate in both assignments. As mentioned, having two rates is a feature and solves for unusual situations.
Workflows
The flip-side of an assignment is the workflow. While a People Ops department or agency might see things in terms of assignments, the senders see things in terms of a workflow.
As we discussed, the assignment holds a bunch of configuration, of which the key part is who will do what. In essence, a workflow stores who will do what with the sender's timesheets.
A workflow is assigned to each of its senders. The sender's activities used in their journal must be linked to a workflow. This linkage is saying "here's who deals with signing-off on the time spent on activity Y".
When a timesheet is created, a copy of the workflow is written into it. Therefore, if you alter a workflow or delete it, it will not impact any timesheets that have already been created.
The workflow knows of the teams responsible for the approve and process steps and it's the team inbox ID and not its members that gets written into the timesheet.
Adding or removing members from a team will have immediate impact, because timesheets are sent to team inboxes, not to individuals.
Contact suggest@zipwire.io
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