ACTIVITY: The type of work being carried out, such as Typing, Inspecting, Attending Meetings, Programming, etc.

ACTUAL VALUES: A value (hours or monetary) that has been built up from actual timesheet entries and not an Estimated value. Sometimes (confusingly, see above!) abbreviated to ACT in the system.

ANNUAL (ON-GOING) PROJECT: A project which would normally have no identifiable end, such as a maintenance or administrative type of project. Projects such as "General Filing" or "Electrical Maintenance" are never completed, as such. These projects should be defined with a common code in the CLEAR DOWN field in the project maintenance screen.

ANULEAVE: A FIXED PROJECT relating to annual leave (holidays).

BACKUP: Any computer system which is using changing data should be "backed up" regularly. This involves copying the data in the system to some other form of storage medium which can be kept, safely, away from the computer. Thus, if the computer develops a fault, or is stolen, or the data is accidentally erased or corrupted in some way, you can restore the situation by copying the data back again. It is recommended that you make a backup every day, but certainly once a week when all timesheets have been entered. See the chapter on installation for details of how to automate backup procedures.

BATCH ROUTINE: A term meaning that many records are updated, based on some previously-input data, rather than updating one record at a time. In early versions of Resource Manager^TM, timesheets were input to the system and, when they were all input, a weekly BATCH run would take each timesheet in turn and update the relevant Employee and Project records. In version 3.00 and later the Employee and Project records are updated instantly a timesheet is entered. The only part of the current system which runs in a BATCH mode is the processing of Cost Changes, Annual Project Clear Down, Reorganising of Files, Holiday Year Reset and the various Deletion routines.

CATEGORY: A field in the Project record for descriptive and/or report grouping purposes. The code is not validated and must be maintained by the user.

CHARGE: An amount of money that you charge other departments for work that you have carried out for them, or for materials that you have supplied to them or expenses which you have incurred on their behalf.

CHARGE METHOD: The way in which you charge other departments. This can be based on actual work that your staff have carried out for the other department, or you may have an agreement to charge a set amount for a particular project, regardless of how much time has been spent on it by your staff, or you may want to charge a regular amount each month for providing ad hoc services. You can set up a default charge method per project, although you can change (and mix) the charge method when entering timesheets.

CHARGE RATE: Each Employee can have up to three separate charge rates. These represent the hourly rate that their work would normally be charged out at. Rate 1 is the usual charge rate for the Employee, rates 2 and 3 are normally reserved for overtime working or possibly for different rates for different clients or different types of work.

CLIENT: The department or section for whom you are doing the work. If work is for your own section you should have the name of your own section set up in the client table (or you could call yourselves "INTERNAL").

COMPLETION: The date a Project ends, or is completed. In the Project screen there is one field for an Estimated Completion date (EST) and one for an Actual Completion date (ACT). The system will not accept timesheet entries for a date later than the Actual Completion date.

COST: The Cost of a Project, or of individual units of work within projects, or of Materials/Expenses relating to a project. Cost is not the same as charge. It may be, for instance, that you have agreed to charge a client at a rate of £10.00 per hour for work carried out. It is not the client's fault if, because of some more urgent requirement, you have had to postpone his work until, say, a week-end. You can still charge the client at only £10.00 per hour, but it will have COST you an overtime rate. By maintaining charges and costs separately, an accurate view of the profitability of specific projects can be seen.

COST RATE: Each employee can have up to three separate cost rates which, in most cases, will represent the employee's basic, overtime and, if applicable, double time rates of pay. Whether you add anything to each rate to represent additional (overhead) costs is up to you.

CREDIT GL CODE: See GL CODES.

DATA: Information which (in most cases) you have entered to the system yourself. In other words, information about specific employees, projects, timesheets, etc. Anything other than the programs.

DATABASE: All the data (often contained in many different DATA files) which is used in one system. The Resource Manager^TM system accesses one or more database consisting of a number of data FILES.

DATES: Dates in Resource Manager^TM are shown in the form dd/mm/yy. In Resource Manager^TM the last two (year) digits refer to the century starting on 1st January 1960, so the data 01/01/00 is the 1st January 2000.

DEBIT GL CODE: See GL CODES.

DEFAULT: A value or code used "by default", i.e., which, in many cases, can be either accepted or overridden.

DELETIONS: As the years pass, you will probably want to delete old projects, retired employees and timesheet records. There is a range of options in the Utilities menu which enable you to do this, so that your computer does not become "full up". You can still keep deleted data by copying it to floppy disks or to some other magnetic medium.

DIRECTORY: An area of the computer disk, more recently called a "folder". Resource Manager^TM is usually kept in a directory called RESMAN, with the data stored in separate directories. See your DOS manual for more details about directories.

DOS: Disk Operating System. The "controlling" programs which will have been supplied with your computer and which are needed to make it know what to do when you, for instance, press a letter on the keyboard or copy something to or from a floppy disk. Resource Manager^TM is an Application System, in other words it has some direct application or relevance to the outside world. DOS is sometimes known as PC-DOS, which is the IBM equivalent of MS-DOS, which stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System (Microsoft being the company who developed and own it).

EMPLOYEE: Someone who carries out work in your department or section.

ESCAPE: The "Escape" key, normally marked Esc, enables you to "escape" from the current position on screen and either go back to the previous field or to clear off a selection table or return to a menu.

ESTIMATED VALUES: Values (hours, charges, costs, materials) which are based on some estimate of future work.

EXPENSES: See MATERIALS

EXTRACT FILE: A computer file generated by Resource Manager^TM for "exporting" to another computer system.

FIELD: An item of information within a RECORD. The project Description, for instance is a field within a Project Record.

FILE: a store of many similar types of data. All data about Projects, for instance, is stored in a Project file. A number of files containing related in formation (e.g. all the data files - Projects, Employees, Timesheets, Tables, etc. - which make up the Resource Manager^TM system), is called a DATABASE. Also, the programs which run Resource Manager^TM are stored in files.

FIXED PROJECTS: There are four Fixed Projects in the Resource Manager^TM system. These are ANULEAVE (Annual Leave), SICLEAVE (Sick Leave), STATHOLS (Statutory Holidays - bank holidays) and TMINLIEU (Time in Lieu). It is not possible to delete Fixed Projects. Even if someone is off sick, a timesheet should be submitted for them with an entry for each day of their sickness equal to their normal daily hours of working. The same applies to holidays and time taken off in lieu of previous overtime working.

FLEXI TIME: The facility to work hours of ones own choosing, to a certain extent.

GL CODES: General Ledger Codes, sometimes known as Nominal Codes or Cost Centres. If you are using the system for cross-charging purposes you may want to record the codes against which you will credit and debit the transfer of funds. If you set up a Credit GL Code against each Project, this will be used to credit funds. If this field is left blank against any project, the system will use the GL code of the section to which the Employee who did the work belongs. The code(s) to be debited must be agreed with the client department and are entered via the client option on the Projects entry screen.

GLOBAL: A term meaning throughout the data. To update cost rates "Globally" just means that all employees will be updated at once by a set percentage rather than having to be amended individually.

GROUP: A two-digit code which you can use to group certain projects together for reporting or other purposes.

HOLIDAY YEAR: The 12 month period over which holidays are taken. Usually coincides with the financial or calendar year. It is possible, within Resource Manager^TM, to give each Employee a separate Holiday Year Start Date.

HOURS: Fields relating to hours are held as hours and minutes. All time-related information in the system is in hours and minutes, not hours and decimals of an hour.

HOURS OVERTIME: See OVERTIME

HOURS SPECIAL CASE: See SPECIAL CASE

HOURS WORKED: The hours actually worked in a week by an employee. If the system is set to Flexi-Time, the Hours Worked must be entered separately from the actual Timesheet entries, either as a single figure in the Timesheet Header or via time-table entry (if the system is set to accept Time-tables).

IDENTIFICATION: See PASSWORD

INDEX: Records are stored in a computer file in the order that they were input. Sorting a data file is time-consuming and cannot be done every time a new record is created. Instead, each data file will have one or more index files (in our system they end with the suffix NTX) which stores the position, in its file, of each record. The index file is used, like the index of a book, to reference the exact location of a record, so that it can be recovered quickly.

INVOICES: Documents generated by the system automatically to facilitate cross-charging from one department to another.

KEY REFERENCES: Your section or department may need to hold information in a structured way with each project. A solicitor, for instance may need a quick reference to the court involved in a particular case, or the name and address of a witness, or police officer. A housing department may wish to keep names and telephone numbers of emergency key holders. You must decide on your key reference headings (COURT, WITNESS, PC, KEYHOLDER, etc.) and set these up in the Utilities, System Details Menu. Then, when you create or modify projects you can select one of these headings and type the details (name and address or whatever) under it. Key References can also be viewed and updated while entering timesheets.

LAST WORKED: The date work was last carried out on a Project. This field is updated automatically via timesheet entries.

LEADER: The person (Project Leader) who is responsible for co-ordinating/managing a project.

MATERIALS: Any expense which is not derived from the time of an Employee, e.g. the purchase of project-related equipment, attending training courses, travelling expenses, etc. These can be recorded against the relative Project and subsequently charged to the client department, if necessary.

NETWORK: A number of computers (usually of the PC type) linked together to enable a number of users to access the same data or programs. A networked version of Resource Manager^TM is available.

OVERTIME: Time worked over an Employee's normal hours of working. If Flexi-Time is worked it is still possible to define some hours as Overtime.

OVERTIME INDICATOR: Denotes whether an Employee is normally Paid for overtime working or is normally given Time off in lieu of overtime. This is a DEFAULT indicator, and can be overridden at timesheet entry.

PAYMENTS RECEIVED: It is possible to record, against specific invoices, whether payment for that invoice has been received.

PASSWORD: A secret password that you must enter to gain access to the system. If you don't have a password, or the system doesn't seem to recognise it, you must see the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.

PC: Personal Computer. The term for a desk-top, or small business, computer. The industry standard is based on the IBM series introduced in the early 1980s and built around the Intel range of 80x86 and Pentium™ micro-chips.

PLANNING: The facility to record, against each Project, details of which Employees will be carrying out the work, when they will be doing it and what Activities they will be engaged in.

PROGRAM: A sequence of instructions, written by a computer programmer. Many separate programs go to make up the Resource Manager^TM system. All the programs are "compiled" together into just a few files. It is not possible for you to see the actual programs as written by the programmers. The programs are separate from the DATABASE, but act upon it, or interrogate it, to retrieve, display, update and re-store individual items of data..

PROJECT: A job. Something which has to be accomplished, like The Building of a Leisure Centre. See also FIXED PROJECTS.

PROJECT GROUP: See GROUP.

QUIT: Select Quit to exit from a screen or menu. If an option to select Quit is not shown at the bottom of the screen, or as a menu option, press <Esc> (the Escape key) or click the right mouse button, to exit from the current screen or selection table.

RECORD: A set of information about, say, one Project or Employee. A record is made up of a number of "fields" many records are held in a "file".

REORGANISE FILES: An option to "tidy up" the database by re-using space previously held by now-deleted records and by recreating the indexes which help the system to locate records quickly. When the system is first used Reorganising files will create the initial empty database. Also, when a new version is installed, reorganising files modifies the database structure to match the new programs.

RESTORE: A DOS command which reads previously-backed up files back onto your computer. Remember that data being restored will over-write data in files of the same name as that of the backed-up data. See BACKUP and your DOS manual.

REPORT: Information sent to the printer and printed on paper (a "hard copy"). Resource Manager^TM has the facility to view most Reports on the screen, but they are still primarily intended for printing. Reports are "scrolled" to a file, rather than sent immediately to the printer, and can then be either printed or displayed on screen.

SECTION: A sub-section or group of Employees. You may have a Research and Development Section or a General Administration Section, for instance, and want to see Reports by Section, for distribution to section heads. A GL Code can be maintained per section for crediting purposes.

SICLEAVE: A FIXED PROJECT relating to absence due to sickness.

SPECIAL CASE: A value input to the Timesheet Header denoting any hours of Overtime which, although normally taken by this employee as Time in Lieu, are to be taken as Paid in this instance, or vice versa.

START DATE: The start date of a Project. Timesheet input will not be accepted for a project if it is for a week earlier than the Start Date.

STATHOLS: A FIXED PROJECT relating to Statutory Holidays (Bank Holidays).

SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR: The supervisor in charge of Resource Manager^TM in your section or department. The System has access to the parts of the system where tables and other controls are set up.

SYSTEM CONTROLLER: Whereas the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR controls one database, in multi-user versions of Resource Manager^TM the System Controller controls passwords, including those of the System Administrator(s).

TABLE: A list of options defined by the System Administrator. A client table, for instance, is set up by the System Administrator, and then used in the Project input screen to select the relevant client.

TASKS: "Stages" or sub-projects within a Project. The Task facility can either be used entirely within the Resource Manager^TM system or can be used to link with an external "Critical Path" type of computer system.

TIME IN LIEU: Time taken in lieu of paid overtime.

TIMESHEET: The document, not provided as part of the Resource Manager^TM system, on which individual Employees record details of the work they have done on specific Projects, etc., and which are then transposed into the system.

TIMESHEET HEADER: A weekly on-screen summary of each Employee's hours worked. Depending on how the system is set up, some fields in the Header may have to be updated by the user.

TIMESHEET DETAILS: Line by line entry of the individual blocks of work carried out by Employee, by Project, by Activity and by Task.

TIMETABLE: The actual arrival, departure and break times of an Employee. Must be completed for each Employee each week if the system is set to Flexi-Time WITH Timetable Entry. Not recommended.

TMINLIEU: A FIXED PROJECT relating to time taken in lieu of paid overtime.

UTILITY: A vague term for anything that is outside the general day-to-day running of the system. Set up, global updates, global deletions are all referred to as Utilities in the system.

WEEK-COMMENCING: Most time-related dates in the Resource Manager^TM system are Week-Commencing dates, i.e. Mondays. This is because, usually, work carried out during a week by one employee, where he/she has been working on one Project, doing the same Activity and Task, is added together to give a total number of hours which could, in fact, have been carried out on several days of the week. This does not apply to Material purchases or expenses, which can be input for any date.

MS-WINDOWS: The ubiquitous family of graphic operating systems from Microsoft (hence the "MS"). They include Windows 3.1 (and 3.11) and Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT (for networks), Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

© Wolff Ltd 2004.

This manual is for use by the registered user of the Resource Manager^TM system.