1. Administrator Guide
  2. Introduction
  3. Application Overview

Application Overview

OpenAir contains various applications, which are designed around specific functional areas such as Projects, Timesheets, Expenses, and Resources. The way these applications operate in your environment is dependent on the business needs of your company. This Administrator Guide steps through the configuration options and provides business and operational processes as well as best practices for the different applications. The applications are described as follows:

Administration Application — This is where you control your company's settings and many configuration options within OpenAir. There are two main selections under Administration: Global Settings and Application Settings. Each is described as follows.

Home Application — The Home application is essentially a home base application that is meant to convey critical information to employees such as messages and reminders of pending approvals. It also contains various wizards, which help you quickly update data throughout the account. You can mount reports onto the dashboard for quick access to saved reports. You can enable a graphical reporting dashboard to represent saved reports in forms such as pie charts and line graphs. While this is helpful, not all reports designed in OpenAir lend themselves to graphical representation. See Home.

Opportunities Application — The Opportunities application enables you to manage prospective new business for your company with existing customers as well as with new customers and prospects. You are able to create Deals, Estimates, Proposals, To dos, and Events within the application. Many current OpenAir companies now use the OpenAir/NetSuite integration for this functionality. See Opportunities or contact OpenAir Customer Support and request information about the OpenAir/NetSuite integration.

Projects Application — The Projects application is one of the primary components within OpenAir. This is the application where management of your company's projects takes place. The application is flexible and provides several features to address your company's needs. See Projects.

Resources Application — The Resources application enables you to schedule resources to projects. It also provides a vehicle to store an employee's skill set, education, industry experience, job roles and location in the OpenAir database. You can then search the database to find the right resource. See Resources.

Invoices Application — The Invoices application handles financial transactions such as customer charges and invoices in OpenAir. Primarily focused on invoicing your customers, the Invoices application manages the results of running the billing rules that you can set up for projects in the Projects application. See Invoices and Projects.

Timesheets Application — The Timesheets application is where employees record their time against customer or internal projects. See Timesheets.

Expenses Application — The Expenses application is where employees may enter expense reports against projects for a specific date or period of time. It also can handle authorizations for employee spending on company expenses. See Expenses.

Purchases Application — The Purchases application within OpenAir provides the ability to create a process flow from a purchase request to fulfillment and receipt, and lets you track purchases made within your company. See Purchases.

Reports Application — The Reports application provides employees the ability to create and run a wide variety of reports based on your company's configuration. OpenAir provides a robust and flexible reporting environment. See Reports.

Workspaces Application — The Workspaces application provides employees with an area to store documents and share them with others. It acts as an administrative library within OpenAir. See Workspaces.

User Center — The User Center draws together all OpenAir user features into a common area. Hover over the User Center to access the Help and Support features.

Note:

OpenAir Customer Support cannot act as an administrator for company specific data-related items such as unlocking employee accounts or resetting passwords. As an account administrator, you perform these tasks for your company.