Frequently Asked Questions

The easiest way to report what you are working on in Brium is via chat. Just type the name of the project you are working on and Brium will start keeping track of your time, until you switch projects or you complete your work hours for the day. Check out the Help section 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 the panel of your Brium Dashboard at https://brium.me.

Moreover, if you use Slack, 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 in the Profile section, 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 configuration 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 favorite client, such as Adium or Pidgin.

Last but not least, you can always chat to Brium right on the website, using the entry bar on the Dashboard.

On the Time off section you can see the time off divided in two main types: (public) holidays and requested time off.

Public holidays must be defined by admins, creating the corresponding calendars. Then users must select a calendar from their Profile page.

• There can be several calendars for a given country, for example depending on regional holidays or religious holidays applicable to some workers.
• These holidays will always be discounted from any expected work time for that user.

Time off requests must be created by each user, using a straightforward form available in the Time off section. There are different types of time off requests.

• Currently, we have two types: “Vacations” and “Days off”. In the future we will have more specific categories for “Days off”, like “Sick leave”, “Personal time”, “Parental leave”, etc.
• Note also that Brium allows for half-day time off requests.

Admins can control which time off requests are discounted from any expected work time and/or whether they are paid (PTO). By default, all requests are SFE (subtracted from expected) and PTO.

During time off, 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 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:

• No status
• Non-billable
• Billable
• Billed

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.

Everything you tell Brium you are working on (i.e., the entry you make via chat or panel) 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:

• myapp: documentation
• myapp: testing
• myapp: landing page design

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.

On the other hand, Brium allows admins to define Clients & Work Packages. Each client can have several work packages associated with it, and admins can assign each activity (each entry) to a work package. Work packages are typically related to the billing pipeline. For example, each work package can relate to a different keyword, or the same keyword can relate to a work package for an initial period of time, and later relate to another work package at a different period, like “phase 1” and “phase 2” of a given project.

Brium does not use the word “Project” for any of these concepts, so admins can combine clients, work packages, keywords and activities as they see fit for monitoring and measuring the progress of the work.

Brium has 4 kinds of pre-canned reports

• Current Work: shows how many hours have been worked in a given period of time. You can see them distributed by user or by keyword. The aim is to give you a picture of “what’s being worked on and how much”.
• Billing Status: shows the worked hours along time, indicating also their billing status. The aim of course is to show how your billing flow is going, compared to previous times.
• Time Report Overview: It starts with a panel showing the hours worked per user per day, with a color scale for fulfillment. Then you can select a particular user and get a full report on their performance: fulfillment of expected hours at different periods and along time, considering also public holidays and other time off. This should serve both admin and user, to identify strengths and weaknesses, and overall productivity and wellness.
• Other reports: by customizing simple queries, you can generate iInvoices includinggenerate a breakdown by work package and/or by worker.project and then by worker of the worked hours for a specific client. We also offer a visualization playground and integration with Redash where, if you have some SQL experience, you can create the views of the data you want.

If none of these reports suits your needs, you can always extract your data from Brium to perform your own analysis (see below).

If you want to work with the raw data, you can simply choose the entries to work with and download them as CSV. Also, if you have development experience, you can extract all the information via the API (see below).

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!