After sign-up you will find yourself on the Acorn Dash main dashboard where two sample client companies have been created with example jobs recorded within them. You can delete these clients and jobs at any time, they are just there to ensure that all of the pages within Acorn Dash show something meaningful for beginners.
If you want to remove the sample data immediately (perhaps you are an experienced Acorn Dash user but are setting up a fresh system) then the quickest way to do this is to delete these companies from the Manage Clients page.
Basic concepts
Acorn Dash revolves around Jobs and Companies. As the creator of the dashboard you are considered to be a Super User from the Owner Company (you can choose to have more than one super user, more about that later). The Owner Company is the company which set up the Acorn Dash system. Owner Companies will probably want to set up Client Companies which are your customers, and those client companies will in turn will have users. In our examples, ABC Services Limited is the Owner Company and its super user is highlighted in yellow:
In the example above we have created four client companies, each with a few users. Later in this document we’ll see how client companies and users are added.
Acorn Dash provides a way for people to assign jobs to one another and keep track of them. Users are given permissions which define how many of the other companies and users are visible to them when they are logged in to the system. A super user will be able to see anything (except “private” jobs, more about those later). Users lower down in the hierarchy may be restricted, so for example when they log in to the system our green user in Deakin and Deakin may only be able to see jobs belonging to Deakin and Deakin – they may not even know that SmithCo and the other companies exist. Users don’t belong to a single company, they merely have permission to see jobs related to that company.
There is a special class of user called “Assignable to Jobs” – these are users who can be chosen as the assignee when a job is created. They also have the ability to log time against a job. Non-assignable users can create jobs and post information and resources up to them, but they can’t record any time. In general you would only set assignable user status to staff members in the Owner Company.
Adding Clients and Users
From the “Manage” menu in the main drop-down menu bar (left of page in desktop view, top of page in mobile view) you can access the two main management functions, for adding/removing Clients and Users.
To add a new Client choose the “Manage Clients” option:
This will take you to the client list page which shows all your current clients and give the option to add new ones:
The Add New client button will take you to a form where you can specify the client name and (optionally) the number of “Retainer Hours” (guaranteed hours of work that you provide for this client during their normal billing cycle), the “Standard Rate” (hourly rate that you charge the client) and “Gratis” flag which is used to indicate a client for whom you work without issuing hourly-rate invoices. Of these only the Client Name is a required entry:
You should also chose which users have access to this client. Users will only see client jobs if these user access links have been made. This way you can keep your staff focused on work related to them and not clutter their personal dashboards with lots of jobs with which they have no direct association.
Adding Users is very similar:
Users require an email address (they will be sent joining instructions), a role (which defined their level of permissions in the system) and you have to choose whether they are an “Assignable user”.
After creating a user they will be emailed a password – as site owner you will also be shown this just once, so you can keep a record of it:
Their email will contain a verification link – they will be unable to log in until this link has been used. This is to ensure that their email address is reliable:
A user can be assigned to and removed from clients at any time. They can be deleted from the system and if necessary recovered from the “Recycle Bin” too. Much like in accounting or bookkeeping activities, deletions from Acorn Dash can usually be recovered – this is to ensure that historical reports can’t be deliberately changed in the future without requiring top level administrative privileges.
Creating and Assigning Jobs
Typically, an Acorn Dash user who is associated with a client company will log in to Acorn Dash to raise a job with the Owner Company. They start by clicking on “Add a New Job” in the menu bar:
The “Add a new Job” form allows them to specify details about the job and assign it to an “Assignable User”. Some of the fields one the new job form are required, but most are optional. By assigning the job a priority you can ensure how high it appears in the jobs list of the user that you are assigning the job to:
You can upload files which will be stored with this job. The WYSIWYG editor for the full description also allows you to cut and paste images. Once a job description has been entered you will see a pop-up asking who should be notified (by email) about the job:
Assuming that you tick “Save and Send Emails” (rather than “Save Only”) then the job will be logged, and each of the chosen users will receive an email which contains the new job description, links back to Acorn Dash, and download links for any files that you added:
Accessing your Jobs
For convenience Jobs are given a numeric identifier, which can be used to find related jobs, and to quickly jump to a specific job from anywhere in the site using the form at the bottom of every page:
All users of Acorn Dash have a Jobs page which is accessible from the main menu. By default it shows a list of current jobs belonging to or assigned to that user, in descending order of priority (e.g. the Highest priority jobs appear at the top of the list). Down the left hand side of the page (or above it in mobile view) is a form which allows you to choose more selectively, e.g. only showing jobs reported by a specific person, or of a certain status. There is a free text search box at the bottom of this form. The column headings are clickable, to enable sorting.
You can click through to a job from this list where the original description is shown along with the “Ongoing Log” of activities related to that job. Assignable users and any other users associated with the job can post updates to it, but only Assignable users can record time against it. This data is used to feed the reporting systems – non-assignable users are not allowed to record time because it would make the invoicing system rather unpredictable (you wouldn’t want to bill a client company for their own staff’s time on a job!)
Updating Jobs
To add an update to a job click on the green button and a new WYSIWYG editor will appear – you can also alter some of the key settings such as the job priority at this point (to make more detailed changes to the job, for instance to assign it to a different user, you need to use the Edit Job feature available from the Jobs page). Updates to jobs can contain more files – at the top of every job page there is a date-ordered list of all files that have been included in a job, so if for instance the users are bouncing a Word document around it is easy to find the latest one at any time.
As jobs are updated and time is recorded against them the time can be see in the Updates page. Users with Manager level privileges and above can access Reports and Invoicing pages.
When a job has been completed (or Signed-off, On the Shelf, Cancelled, and so on), it will disappear from the user’s main job list (you can still find it by using the “Completed Jobs” selection in the jobs search form).
“Completed Gratis” is a special case which you can use to mark a job as completed without its hours appearing on the Invoicing reports.
Reports
The Reports page lets you see the number of hours logged by individuals and by client. The “Unbilled” hours reports show how many hours have accrued since each client was last invoiced:
There is a monthly report for each Assignable user:
This is especially useful for comparative purposes, to see if you have a member of staff who routinely books much less work down against a client.
Invoicing
The Invoicing report lets a managerial user see how much time has been logged and can only be cleared by marking a job against an invoice number.
To mark jobs as “invoiced” you need to enter a unique invoice reference number and select which jobs you want to be added to that invoice. By default any outstanding hours will be cleared from the job, but by altering the figure in the “Hours to Invoice” field you can selectively invoice for less than the full hours outstanding.
Once you have selected “Mark Invoiced” you are given the opportunity to save the data to an external file (“Save Data to CSV”) or cut/paste it in a useful format (“Copy Data to the Clipboard”). Once you select “Mark Invoiced” those hours will be removed from the uninvoiced total for each job. WHen a job has no outstanding hours left to invoice it will disappear from the Invoicing page, even if it is still an active job that has work left to do. By this means you can issue periodical invoices against the hours worked rather than just completed jobs, which can be great for cashflow.
[last updated: 2020_04_06: 1718]