Help Index

General Notions and Functionality Concepts

Domain
Account types
User and Project Groups
Access permissions
Visibility scope
Roles and rates

Domain

Domain is your company online intranet located at yourdomain.aheadoffice.com. It contains all activity, files, database, discussions, staff and customers accounts, schedules and other things your company contributes.

Account types

There are only 2 account types: regular users and account managers. The only difference between the account types is access permissions.

Account managers have unlimited privileges in your domain, that means that all account managers can observe, add and modify any information under your domain, including user accounts, invoices, projects, etc.

Regular users can only interact with objects to which they have access.

To set or unset account manager privileges for an account just check or uncheck "Account manager" checkbox in the account settings or during account creation.

User and Project Groups

Group is an abstraction for more easier and comfortable access and accounts management.

Account managers can create user groups and assign users to them. Each user may belong to not more than one group, or don't belong to any.

Project groups consist of the account manager who created the project and all people assigned to this project. Do not mess project and user groups - a user can participate in several projects, thus belong to several project groups.

Access permissions

There are 3 types of access permissions in aheadOffice:

Full, that allows full access to an object and its folded elements;
View, that allows to view the object and its folded elements without permissions to modify or delete them;
Deny, that doesn't allow anything, the object and its folded elements would not be even seen.

The following objects have managed access permissions:

Contact categories (contacts are folded elements)
File share folders (files are folded elements)
Projects (tasks are folded elements)

This means that you can set any type of access to any user account or group in your domain. By default, all accounts and groups have "Full" access to all objects, except projects. To change this default behavior, go to Administration -> Default permissions and edit the settings.

This feature is available for account managers only.

Projects access is based on people and groups assigned to the project: all accounts and groups assigned to a project can create, edit or delete tasks belonging to the project, but cannot change the project settings - this is a privilege of account managers and the project owner. All people who are not involved in a project won't even see it.

Account managers have full access on all objects and projects.

Visibility scope

Restriction of visibility scope actually means that invisible user accounts and groups won't be seen in account/group selection interfaces in all parts of the system.
To restrict some accounts from seeing and interacting with other accounts you can set visibility scope for accounts and/or groups. To manage visibility scope for users or groups go to Administration -> User management or Administration -> Group management and click "Visibility" link. You'll be presented with a tabbed window with all accounts and groups under your domain. By ticking the accounts or groups you restrict the current account from seeing them. This is useful for separating customers from all staff except their managers, or customers one from from another, or just separating project groups so they don't have to scroll long user lists and see only people whom they are working with.

Account managers have full visibility scope, that means they can see and are seen by everyone.

If invisible for each other accounts have are members of the same project, they can see each other's tasks and comments.

Roles and rates

Roles can be compared to usual positions or job titles. You can define global roles and their hourly rates accessible from any project under your domain, or create project-specific roles and rates. Former is comfortable when you have a special position for a project or season jobs. Global roles should be used for positions that are in the company constantly or for a long time. When managing a task you are able to set amount of hours used to complete the task or a part of it up to the moment, for global and/or project-specific roles. This is used for the following purposes:

Create auto-calculated invoices. aheadOffice automatically calculates amount for invoice using tasks hours and their rate. You can request detailed invoice with enumeration of all tasks and how much hours they consumed as well as invoice without detailsation, only totaling the amount. It's also possible to send auto-calculated invoice for the same task some time later - aheadOffice tracks which hours have been invoiced and would calculate only amount for the hours added since the last invoice on the task has been sent. Read more about advanced invoicing.
Reporting functions. You can request reports using any parameters: projects, tasks, involved people, hours or money used etc, thus having immediate access to all kinds of information regarding company workflows. Read more about reporting.

aheadOffice automatically tracks all roles and rates changes: if you change a rate, the new rate would be available immediately.However, this wouldn't touch already invoiced hours, which rate will never change since you sent the invoice. This allows you e.g. have a long-lasting task, send invoice on some hours of the task, continue working on the task and setting new hours, update a rate and send invoice using the new rate value for the same task.

If you have a role which has been used to send an auto-calculated invoice, then this role would never be actually deleted from the system for the purpose of integrity of your financial data. Besides statistical interfaces and any kinds of history data, such roles appear in tasks module, and are greyed out meaning the hours for deleted roles cannot be set or updated.

Global roles and rates are configured from "Administration" tab in the navigation, "Domain settings" -> "Global roles&rates". Project-defined roles and rates can be managed when creating or editing a project under "Roles & rates" tab.