The easiest way to report what you are working on in Brium is via chat. Just tell him the name of the project you are working on and he’ll start keeping track of your time, until you switch projects or you complete your work hours for the day. See our reporting help for a lot of helpful tips when chatting with Brium.
You can also manually enter your tasks for the day or edit any previous entries in your Brium dashboard at https://brium.me.
If you use Slack (if you don’t, you should! It’s awesome), you can add the Brium bot to Slack and talk directly to it, or mention it on any channel.
To add the Brium bot, you can just hit the familiar Add to Slack button during Brium’s signup wizard, and everything will be automatically set up for you. If you have already set up your Brium team, the administrator can always add the integration in the team settings page.
You can also add the Brium contact to your Telegram account from the profile page by starting a new conversation with it.
Furthermore, you have the option to add the Brium buddy to your chat XMPP account, and chat with it through your favourite client, such as Adium or Pidgin.
Last but not least, you can always chat to Brium right on the website, using the embedded chat window.
Brium will send you a chat message asking you what you’re working on every 2 hours by default, but you can tune this from your profile page to be as frequent as 15 minutes or as sporadic as once a day.
If you don’t answer the “What are you working on?” question, Brium will assume you are still working on the same thing you reported before, until it’s time to go home.
Brium will ask you what you’re doing a couple of times each working day starting from the first moment you report something, up until the work day ends. This means that if you tell Brium you work 8 hours a day Brium will ask you what you’re doing from the first report of the day, up until 8 hours later.
Also, Brium will always assume that you work the specified number of hours each day but if you leave early or stay late you can always send bye so Brium can track more accurately how much you have worked that day.
Brium’s billing pipeline allows you to define billable and non-billable hours, and track when they were actually invoiced to your clients. As such, every entry can have any of the following statuses:
In order to change the status of one or more entries, you can go to the Entries page, filter the ones you are interested in, and choose to change their status.
Note that if an entry matches a billable keyword (see below), it will be automatically marked as billable.
Everything you tell Brium you are working on is considered an activity. However, you can prefix activities with keywords, that can have an associated budget.
For instance, an admin can define a keyword called myapp with an estimated effort of 500 hours, so everyone working on myapp related tasks can send reports via chat such as:
Every time one of this reports is sent, Brium will tell the sender how many hours are left for myapp, so everyone can easily keep track of any tasks going over-budget.
Projects, on the other hand, are related to the billing pipeline. An admin can define clients and projects, and then associate an activity to a specific project from the Entries page. Brium then allows you to generate an invoice for a client with a breakdown by project.
Typically, you will want to create a keyword for each project or group of projects that share a common budget or estimate, in order to track the remaining time, and then assign their activities to the actual projects for billing.
Brium has 4 kinds of pre-canned reports, all of them filterable by client or worker, date and billable status.
If none of these reports suits your needs, you can always extract your data from Brium to perform your own analysis (see below), or access the visualizations playground where, if you have some SQL experience, you can use GQL and Google Charts to create the views of the data you want.
All reports can be downloaded as CSV for analysis, and if you want to work with the raw data, can simply choose the entries to work with and download them as CSV as well. Also, if you have development experience, you can extract all the information via the API (see below).
On the Time off section you can define holidays, days off and vacations, which will be considered by Brium as non-workable days, so Brium will not ask workers what they are working on at the beginning of the day. Nonetheless, anyone can still report time as usual if they do some work.
Brium has a comprehensive HTTP based API that allows you to extract information from your entries, workers, clients and keywords. Simply generate an API token to start programmatically interacting with Brium!