1. Administrator Guide
  2. Administration – Global Settings
  3. Account
  4. Optional Features

Optional Features

Optional features list view.

The Optional Features section contains options that impact general OpenAir usage and add features to entities such as Employee records. See Users.

To access Optional features:

  1. Go to Administration > Global Settings > Account > Optional features.

Enable the Vehicle feature: When enabled, Vehicles display in the list of Application Settings under Invoices Settings and Expenses Settings. When one or more vehicles are set up in OpenAir, a Vehicle drop-down list is available on mileage receipts in the Expenses application and on mileage expense charges you create in the Invoices application. See Vehicles under Expenses for information about creating a vehicle in OpenAir.

Only show Customers with projects in the customer:project drop-downs: In many areas of OpenAir, the customer and project field is concatenated into a Customer:Project drop-down menu. Enabling this option populates the drop-down selections with customers that have a projects so you get a consistent Customer:Project value set. When this option is not enabled, customer names without projects also display in the drop-down menus such as Customer X, Customer X:Project Y. Displaying Customers without projects supports a design of recording time and expenses, handling resource allocation, and invoicing at the customer only level.

Show the customer name on project drop-downs and pickers: When writing reports or setting up filter sets, a pick list displays with projects. If this option is enabled, the customer name also displays at the end of the project name in these lists in parenthesis such as Project Y(Customer X). If this option is disabled, only the project name displays.

Show the phase name on task drop-downs and pickers: When handling time recording or resource allocation at the task level, this option enables OpenAir to include the phase name in parenthesis after the task name such as Task Y(Phase X). This is helpful if you have tasks with the same name within a project allocated to different phases [i.e., Design (Pilot), Design (Production)]. When this option is disabled, only the task name displays. Therefore, it is very important that task names are unique and clear.

Group employees by type (i.e., generic/guest) on drop-downs and pickers: This option provides a sorting or ordering approach to your employee based drop-downs so that different resource types (e.g., Regular, Guest, Generic) appear in groups within the menu. When enabled, generics and guests generally appear at the bottom of the menus, with each group ordered alphabetically. When disabled, generics and guests are listed within the regular employee list in alphabetic order with an identifier (generic or guest) after the employee name.

Use the service name as the default description: Throughout OpenAir, services are typically used to track categories of labor or accounting allocation information. However, there is no restriction on what a service can be used for within OpenAir. Due to its unique handling within OpenAir regarding its inclusion on timesheets and invoice charges, your OpenAir configuration may include using a service for something unique to your organization. The name of a service may align with how you view information for display on invoices, for example. In this case, instead of entering the description information separately as part of a billing rule or charge creation, you may enable this option to reuse the service name. Enabling this option usually assumes that time is tracked to a task level, and that either the time entry or the task itself holds a service. When this option is disabled, you must manually enter the description field.

Hide the Job code on lists and reports unless employee has "View job codes" privilege: With the ability to use the job code in many report filtering options and to be able to override the job code field name using terminology override, the job code becomes an area that may be used to capture sensitive information related to a person's job category or level. This is information that, more likely than not, should not be available to everyone in the organization. If you have configured OpenAir to have sensitive information in this area, you can use this option so that employees who have permission to view job codes may only view the job code value of his/her own record. With this option enabled, the job code field is hidden throughout OpenAir such as on reports and in the customized page lists. If this option is disabled, then the job code is available throughout OpenAir as a regular field on reports and customize lists which support the field.

Allow the message board text to be customized by department: The Home application has a central Message Board that is used to communicate to OpenAir users. In many cases, more than one department in a company may be set up to use the OpenAir environment and they can be performing different functions. For example, Sales and Operations may be using timesheet entry but the data entry policies for those two departments may be different. Setting up departments within OpenAir lets you allocate employees to a specific department. The Message Board text by department option gives you the ability to set up message board communications to specific groups of employees. The text is entered in the Departments entity and overrides the general message board content. See Departments. If you have this option selected and no specific department text has been created, the general message board text is visible. If this option is not enabled, the general message board is visible to all employees.

Enable additional address lines three and four: This option expands the Customer and Employee address fields to allow for a 3rd and 4th line, which displays on formatted reports such as invoices or timesheets.

Payroll integration (drop-down list): OpenAir enables the integration with the following payroll systems: Ceridian PowerPay, Paychex, ADP-PCT and ADP-NobleStar. This is an optional service providing your company subscribes to the payroll systems.

Enable employee tag feature: The employee tag feature enables the tracking of custom field information in a defined tag field over time. Each tag entry is associated with a timeframe (current or start/end date). As with custom fields, you may define as many tag groups as you need with as many values in each tag group as you need. The enabling of the tag group feature displays a tag link on the Employee accounts for value setting. Tag groups may be used to filter information on reports. See Tag Groups and Employee Entity Tag.

The main differences between employee-based custom fields and tag groups are:

Custom fields may also be restricted from viewing within an employee's role. However, this must be done through form permissions and still give employees the ability to view custom field information in reports. Custom fields also do not track values over time. When the field is set or changed, that is the field value for current and historical reporting.

Enable target utilization feature: The target utilization feature enables the tracking of an employee's utilization % target in a defined field over time. Each utilization entry is associated with a timeframe (current or start/end date). The enabling of the target utilization feature displays a Target Utilization link on the Employee accounts for value setting. See Target Utilization.

Enable work schedule time ranges: The overall use of this optional feature is to control resource bookings from a start time point in a day. For example: If a workday is defined as 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and an employee is booked to work 100% of the time starting at 10 a.m. for the day, the number of hours would compute to 6 hours of effort. To use this feature, you must set up work schedules in OpenAir to have a start/end time definition per day and an optional override at the employee work schedule level on the start/end time of the day. See Work Schedules.

Enable distinct work hours per day on work schedule, e.g. 8 hours Monday, 4 hours Tuesday, etc.: enables work hours to be scheduled for a different number of hours for each work day. When reports use work schedule hours, the hours vary based on the work schedule. For any report where hours are converted to days, the average hours for the week is used for the calculation. When enabled, the work hours per day can be assigned to both work schedules and to individual employees.

Important:

Varying the work hours per day definition impacts daily billing rules. If the day is defined as 4 hours and an 8 hour workday is entered on timesheets, the billing rules treats this as 2 days of work.

Enable multi-week work schedule. Maximum number of weeks: The multi-week work schedule feature enables using a varying work schedule that spans several weeks. For example, a schedule may be 4 10-hour days, 1 4-hour day in week one and 5 8-hour days in week two. This enables resource managers to know exactly when resources are available based on varying weekly work schedules. Choose Disabled or 2-, 3- or 4 weeks as the duration of the varying schedule.

Enable internal debugging information capture during Automatic Backup Service execution: Useful for OpenAir engineers to debug Automatic Backup Service (ABS) problems.

Enable QuickViews for bookings, Enable QuickViews for employees, Enable QuickViews for projects, Enable QuickViews for tasks: Control QuickViews availability for each record type. For more information about QuickViews, see QuickViews.

Enable shortcuts: When enabled, account users can create navigation shortcuts to any page in and outside OpenAir from anywhere in OpenAir. Users can then spend less time navigating and more time getting things done. For more information about creating and using shortcuts, see Shortcuts.

Maximum number of shortcuts a user can save: By default, each user can have a maximum of 50 navigation shortcuts at any one time. Enter a number between 1 and 50 to reduce the maximum number of shortcuts allowed.