Step 1: Setting up your Forecast Account

In this article, we will review important account components and the first steps for configuring your Forecast account. Before starting your account configuration, check out Forecast terminology to familiarize yourself with the platform language.

This article covers:

• Basic account administration
• Company Notifications
• Resource Management settings
• Time Management

Basic account administration

Click Admin and select Company Details in the dropdown. Here you will begin building your company profile. Add your company account information including name, logo, contact details, currency, default working hours, weekend visibility, time zone and billable utilization target. 

For more on how these settings are used throughout the platform see, Configuring your Company Account Details.

Resource Management settings

Consider the questions you asked yourself from the first page of this guide:

• How does your team work currently? Is it Agile or Waterfall?
• Do you know the full scope of a project when planning, or do you work in milestones/phase and sprints?
• What existing processes and practices are already in place that you want to improve and maximize efficiency of?

Give careful thought and consideration to this setting, as it is not advisable to flip between allocating resources to projects versus tasks. Instead, select one or the other based on your project management methodology, initiatives and goals. There is no right or wrong answer, you decide what will work best for you and your team!  Learn more about choosing the right resource management setting to fit your project management style in Selecting your resource management strategy.

Allocate people to projects

If you allocate resources at the project level, choose Allocate people to projects. Using Forecast’s Capacity Planning Placeholder feature requires Allocate people to projects or Both project allocations and task assignments. Check out Allocating people to projects (Agile) for more information.

Assign people to tasks

If you know your resource capacity and scope (tasks) when planning projects, select Assign people to tasks. For more on working waterfall and assigning people to tasks, take a look at Assigning people to tasks (Waterfall).

Assign people to tasks has an additional setting to determine how you view the heatmap. Check out Reviewing your resource heatmap (Schedule People) to learn more about this setting and its affect on Schedule People heatmap.

• Heatmap based on Task Estimates: Your heatmap in schedule will be calculated based on the estimated time on the tasks.
• Heatmap based on Time Registrations & Remaining Task Estimates: Your heatmap in schedule will be calculated based on time registrations for past dates and remaining task estimates for current and future dates.

Both project allocations and task assignments

If you use a combination of tasks and project allocations, this setting is for you! Toggling the setting and then choose how to manage heatmap.  Like Assign people to tasks, these settings control time registrations and whether they are included or excluded from the heatmap. 

Company Notifications

Consider the notifications you'd like to set for your entire organization.  Check out Viewing and Configuring Account Notifications for more on company-wide notifications. 

For more on managing personal notifications for individual users see Managing and viewing your personal Forecast notifications.

Labels

Labels help categorize projects, tasks, and people within Forecast. See how to successfully use labels in About labels and how they work. 

Time Management

Forecast provides several options for Time Management. A full list of settings is available in Overview of Time Management Settings.

Time increments

Time registration settings

Internal Time/Time-off

Internal time categories are used for meetings, administrative tasks or training while time-off typically include paid time-off, annual leave, sick time and vacation.  Internal time and Time-off categories can be imported from your existing time tracking application via integrations and will display here. 

Timesheet Approval

Admins and Project Owners review and approve their team members' time registrations from billable projects, ensuring all invoiceable time has been accurately registered before being invoiced. 

Check out Using Timesheet Approval for more information.

Timesheet Locking

Admins and Controllers permission lock company timesheets through a preferred date, preventing team members from editing or deleting existing time entries or adding new time entries in a specific period. 

Find more on Timesheet Locking in About Timesheet Locking.

Next up: Step 2: Configuring your project financial settings