Setup using Text boards columns

1. Create reference items board
2. Create main board setup

1. Create reference items board

1. (Optional) Create new workspace to keep the new boards

2. Create new board

For the purposes of this documentation, we'll assume you created only 1 board (e.g. Clients), but you can have up to 4 levels of references. Each level can use zero of more boards.

For example, if you need 2 levels of references:

you can create 2 boards, e.g. Clients and Projects - 1 for each level.
you can also choose to have 1 board for Clients and not use reference board for Projects level. Instead you can use free text and allow users to enter any project name. See Set up column references for more information about free text mode.
you can also have more boards for your level 1 Clients, e.g. Clients - EU, Clients - US, etc. and use them for level 1 of references.

3. Delete unnecessary columns

delete Status
delete Date

4. (Optional) Add people to Persons column

Assign people to Persons column if certain Clients are only available for certain people. Rename column to "Allowed Persons"

5. Add some example Clients

6. (Optional) Assign people to `Clients`

2. Create main board setup

1. Create new board

This board will be used to store all the entries for your Time Reporting or Planning.

2. Add columns

Time (Numbers)
Date (Date)
(optional) Note (Text)
(optional) Status (Status)

3. Create Text columns which will contain references, up to 4 levels

You can reference up to 4 levels. For the purpose of this document, we create 2 Text columns named Client and Task.

4. Remove items and unnecessary groups

You can remove all the items and groups to start with empty board. All the items here will be created by the Time Reporting or Planning view, so items here should not be created manually.

At this point you should have an empty board with the following columns:

5. Create Time Reporting view and configure columns

Add the view

Newly created view displays information about missing configuration:

Customize View in the right hand view panel to select columns:

Level 1 - Client
Level 2 - Task
Time - Time
Date - Date
(optional) Required levels - 2

Note we selected Required levels to be 2, which means users will be required to select both Client and Task values when adding new row to the time reporting/planning table.

6. Set up column references

We have our Clients board with the list of clients, and Client column in our main board. To connect them, we need to set up the reference in the Reference Boards dialog.

The Reference Boards dialog contains settings for 4 levels of references as well as optional Users references.

Reference boards for Users You can set up board with a list of Users if you want to restrict which Users are able to report time.

Each level can contain zero or more boards.

When the main board is set up with Text columns for any of level 1-4 references, you have an option to use free text without specifying any reference board. In this case users will be able to enter arbitrary text when creating new row in the time reporting/planning table. This may be useful for example when you don't have specified list of tasks or don't want to restrict what specific tasks can be selected.

The example below shows reference for level 1 board (Clients) and level 2 set as free text.

Given this setup, when the user creates a new row in the time reporting/planning table, they will be able to select a Client from the list of clients in the board Clients, and enter any Task name in the free text field.

7. (Optional) Set up copying column values from reference boards

Each reference boards may contain additional columns which can be copied to the main board. For more information about copying values, see Automatically copy values from reference boards to the main board.

Once you've set up the reference boards, you can start adding time entries. Read more in Basic usage.