3 Rarely Used OpenAir Features You May Not Know About – But Should!

OpenAir offers a vast array of management options and features designed to help you support your services operations and increase your bottom line. While there are likely many OpenAir features you already use daily to keep your business running smoothly, it is also likely there are a few you may not know about, and we believe they can save you time and improve efficiency.

1. Conditional Dropdown Custom Fields

Introduced in 2012, the conditional dropdown custom field offers the ability to create a dropdown field with field values that drive the content of another dropdown field.  This feature can save you from having to use and maintain complicated form permission rules. For example, if your first dropdown field is “country” and the user selects the United States, the second dropdown field would be driven from the selection of United States and show to the user the 50 states within the United States.  If the user would have selected Canada, then the second drop down would display the Canadian provinces.

The benefit of conditional dropdown custom fields is that when you are trying to combine fields, you can prevent users from selecting invalid data since everything is controlled. The conditional dropdown field feature requires the internal switch for advanced custom field value editor and conditional associations between values of the separate custom field be activated.  Administrators or user with custom field edit permission can set up a conditional dropdown custom field and use drag/drop data entry methods to associate values between fields. A small amount of setup for what can be big benefits.

2. Timesheet Approval/Rejection Options

Your users may have already asked for the ability to ‘recall’ submitted timesheets because they submitted the timesheet too early.  Good news – this feature already exists! It’s a self-rejection option that you can enable for individuals to reject their own submitted timesheet back to themselves.   There is one dependency however, a timesheet can only be rejected if no time entries have been approved – that includes anything that auto-approves.

Along the lines of timesheet rejections, there are options for reviewers to reject individual time entries instead of an entire timesheet.  By allowing ‘line-item rejection’, the approved portion of a timesheet can proceed to full approval and support quicker invoicing actions while the rejected time entries are separated into their own timesheet for adjustment and resubmission.   This results potentially into multiple timesheets for a time period, so there is also switches to allow the rejected timesheet to rejoin the original timesheet when it is fully approved.

3. Cost Adjustment Based on Utilization  

For margin reporting, there is always a need to track the hourly cost per person.  Since OpenAir deals with hours, the total cost of a person entering time is computed as the cost per hour times the number of hours.   In the case of salaried employees, the cost may be overstated if individuals work more than the expected hours per week for their salary.  For example, many people are paid an annual salary expecting 40 hours per week. If a person works 50 hours in a week, then the company still only pays 40 hours however OpenAir computes 50 hours of cost.  This impacts margins since a higher cost is being considered in calculations in OpenAir.

For organizations who want the cost to more accurately reflect salary cost, there is a need to adjust the cost of time to a normalized salary rate.  The Cost Adjustment Based on Utilization feature will provide the ability to adjust labor cost in these situations. It relies on utilization to determine a working week based on the user’s work schedule then computes a reduced cost per hour so the equivalent cost aligns with the hours worked.   In our 50 week example, the cost of 50 hours needs to match the same cost as 40 hours for a week so the hourly cost per hour is reduced and stored as a historical cost entry in the user’s Loaded Cost table.

Although this feature has been available for some time, it tends to be underused because it is not obvious how to locate and use it in OpenAir.  There is no switch required to enable this feature. You first must run an advanced report (Historical Utilization) since the feature is attached to a report. Also, the feature is only available when the Report Management Interface is not enabled.

The Advanced Historical Utilization report can be configured to define what a work week looks like and how the salary cost adjustment should be processed for reporting.   Once executed, the cost adjustment feature is found in the tips area of the report and creates historical cost entries in the adjusted hourly rate computed. The cost adjustment is only available for primary loaded costs, for those who have multiple user cost level enabled.

If you would like assistance with any of these rarely used features or have other questions regarding OpenAir, contact Top Step Consulting today.