We are an external consulting service provider based in Switzerland and are looking for software that supports us in personnel management, resource planning, and project management. The goal is to ensure accurate quoting and invoicing.
We have the following requirements for the software:
HR functions
- Management of permissions in all categories; write, access, and visibility rights should be able to be defined for each user
- An employee should only be able to see the projects assigned to them
- The following should not be visible to all employees:
- Performance of other employees
- Budget management outside of your own projects
- Visibility of vacation and overtime
- Data of other engineers, such as hourly rates
- Time recording
- should be able to be carried out by each employee themselves
- Option to book hours to assigned projects; it is important that these are marked as billable or non-billable so that the time is correctly transferred to the invoice later
- The format of time entry is important: it should be possible to enter the time according to start and end times or the time used in hours and minutes
- Overtime should be reported by the system
- Separate calculation for overtime, night shift bonuses, additional time, and overtime (Switzerland) should be available
- Vacation
- Administrators should be able to plan vacation
- Requests from employees and approval by supervisors
- Indication of remaining vacation per person
- Individually assignable vacation days per person
- Overview of vacation planning (for supervisors) for all employees, including public holidays and long weekends (also visible to everyone)
CRM
- Store and manage customer and company data
- Database should be available to different users depending on permissions
- Creation of quotes and offers
- Specific layouts and templates should be created for these based on customers or companies
- Certain recurring activities should be able to be quickly inserted as templates
- Transfer of customer data to quotations or projects
- Sending invoices or quotations by email (if necessary, by integrating an external program)
- Quotations should then be transferable to projects; transfer of data
- Manual creation of projects
Projects
- Depending on the type of quotation, it should be possible to insert a layout of the individual phases of the project
- Gantt or Kanban charts should show the individual tasks of the project and be editable so that progress can be checked by supervisors and handover is easy
- Budget adjustments and invoicing for third parties should be possible
- There should be an overview of the projects, their status, and resource utilization
Additional functions
- Tasks: A function for editing tasks and layouts for different types of projects should be available.
- Functions for tracking task status, assignments, responsibilities, and dependencies should be available.
- Communication and collaboration: The application should include a comment function for time tracking and tasks.
- A document repository for individual projects or tasks should be available.
- Data security: Security measures should be in place to ensure the protection of confidential data; this can be achieved through password assignment and two-factor authentication.
- Support: A support team should be available to help with questions or problems.
- Training videos should be available to facilitate familiarization.
In the medium term, approximately 20 software workstations are planned.