Bills, Bills, Bills - PHP

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of syntax and structure, it's important to understand the problems this application will be addressing, so that the functional requirements of the solution become clear. As the Customer explained it, his HRD and Billing people had the following two problems:

1. Most law firms and consultancies bill on an hourly basis. If employees log their hours on paper worksheets and submit them to Billing at the end of every day, it falls to the poor guys in Billing to add up the hours worked on specific projects and generate appropriate invoices. An electronic system, available via the local intranet to every employee, would help tremendously, as the tasks of classification and summation could be handled by the system.

2. Human Resources would also like a peek at the data, in order to locate and resolve staffing and resource allocation issues. It would be helpful to know, for example, the projects (and the tasks within projects) which generate the most activity, so that resources can be allocated to those projects and tasks (or new employees hired to cover the shortfall, if any). It would also be helpful to view activity by user, in order to identify which users are the most productive, which users make the most contributions to specific projects, and which users spend their day playing Tetris.

Having understood the problems, it becomes easier to decide on the requirements of the solution. An analysis of the problems above reveals that most of them would be resolved by a system which:

1. maintained a list of active projects;

2. broke up activity on a project into standard tasks, and maintained a list of these standard tasks;

3. allowed employees to log work hours by project and task, on a daily basis;

4. provided reports on the hours worked by different users on a specific project, together with summary totals (to simplify billing, and to understand employee contributions to different projects);

5. provided reports on the hours spent by users on the different components of a specific project, together with summary totals (to assist in monitoring employee efficiency and resource allocation);

6. provided summary reports on resource allocation across different projects for a specific period of time (to allow managers to develop a big-picture view of employee activity and make corrections, if required)

This, therefore, constitutes the initial feature set for the application, and serves as the guideline for any future development.

It should be noted as this point that these requirements (and consequently, this application) are not limited only to law firms or software consultancies. Information like this would be useful to any company, regardless of size, simply because it would help in analyzing and monitoring employee activity, tracking resource allocation and usage, and resolving possible flaws in internal business processes and systems.

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