OS/ the new Ecosystem for Parasol Island

Welcome

Welcome to OS/ the new ecosystem for Parasol Island! This article will give you an overview about the basic things you need to know to use our new Parasol OS Ecosystem.
We designed OS/ to be self-explanatory, however; should you ever get lost, use the little help & chat function on the bottom right at the red dot.

What's different

Login

• You will receive an invitation via eMail.
• Your Parasol Google Account is your personal login to OS/.

Your Workspace Settings

• After you logged in, please define the Parasol Island GmbH workspace as your Default Workspace in your personal workspace settings in the upper right corner.

Project Types

• Creating a project, also means you have to choose one of the three project types:

1. Client Service Project --> for Regular, paid-for-client projects, generating Revenue
2. New Business Project --> for New business initiatives like pitches, generating Overhead
3. Internal Project --> for Internal and operational projects, generating Overhead

Doing a Budget, your calculation

• Each section and each position (item) is divided into sales (what you sell) and costs (what you need).
• Once you created a position (item), you can set the specific cost source (INT, FMA, EXT) and define the effort that you need.
• Be aware, that Costs -Quantity and -Unit are linked to the Sales -Quantity and -Unit by default. In case you want to unlink and define different values, just click on the chain-icon to unlink.

Overhead Cost Factor

• Your revenue planning and the actual status of your projects will look different than in the old AGS.
• The new OS/ works with a different internal logic than the old agency software and we notice this in the projects, especially in the calculation of the yield / margin / profitability. In short: your projects will have a different target / actual profit in OS/ than they had in AGS and this is not a mistake but right.
• In this context, we have reduced the target-margin in OS/ for client service projects to 15% target-margin.
• Your budgeted costs are also related to specific overheads of your companies workspace, meaning: each cost type can include overhead-costs which are added to your specific project costs and which will influence your project margin.

Your projects from the old AGS

• When transferring the projects from AGS -> OS/, the positions that we have put on NW have not been transferred correctly. They simply do not show any internal effort. Solution: set the unit from e.g. Days to e.g. Hours and back, then it should calculate correctly again.
• Also, at the end of each calculation there is an item with internal hours (sometimes several hundred or thousand). If your positions do have internal costs in the calculation you can deactivate this section.
• Regarding revenue / profit: the new target margin is significantly below (15%) the previous targets. This is due to a new coding of the so called overhead costs. As a result, all current earnings forecasts have also dropped significantly overall. This is, also for me, a real change and especially for existing projects a bit confusing at first. We are now observing / assessing the effects and are of course also dependent on your feedback.

Ressource Planning vs. Booking

• OS/ Resources comes with a new face and new features:

Your projects are now divided into

1. Client Services Projects
2. New Business Projects
3. Internal Projects
4. In these areas the projects are listed by clients
5. Using filters for departments or clients is filtering projects

Plan (Optioning)

• Here you are doing your rough resource planning. This planning is not binding, therefore it does not take care if a specific resource has capacities or not.

Book

• Doing a booking of a resource, is binding - means you book the amount of hours for your project (like you book a freelancer)
• Booked times are not change-able for the actual day
• Booked times will Auto-Convert to tracked time on the next day

Track

Doing timekeeping!

• Here you can track your time on projects you are a member of. Super simple; just type in the amount of hours on each project-line.

Control

• This area helps you to compare the actual amount of tracked hours against your planning/booking.

Absences

Personio

• In Personio werden jegliche Arten von Abwesenheiten beantragt, genehmigt und abgebildet:

[File:Personio 01.png|thumb|Absences_01] [File:Personio 01.png|thumb|Absences_02]

Teamleads

• As a team leader, you can now view and approve your employees' vacation requests in Personio.
• By the way, here you can also see the time tracking of your employees.

Smartsheet

right now, we decided not to connect Smartsheet with OS/. So if you want to create a projectplan for your project, please create it yourself and invite your team, client.

UsageRights, Buyouts, Contracts with Expiring END-Dates

Please use the Asana Board Buyouts&Contracts and create a ticket for any buyout, usagerights you are selling with your project. There is a specific template you just need to choose and fill with your specific project and contract information. More details to find here!

______________ ______________ ______________

In OS/

OS/ Budget

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Doing a Budget, your calculation

• With OS/ Budget, it's super easy to do your calculation by creating sections and positions (items)
• Use the sidebar, to either drag&drop items from the pre-defined services, or already budgeted other projects
• Each section and each position (item) is divided into sales (what you sell) and costs (what you need).
• Once you created a position (item), you can set the specific cost source (INT, FMA, EXT) and define the effort that you need.
• These costs are also related to specific overheads of your companies workspace, meaning: each cost type can include overhead-costs which are added to your specific project costs and which will influence your project margin.

Accounting (Invoices)

Our Accounting Team is taking care of invoices as before.

• As a Projectowner, Supervisor or Head of Department you can see all incoming & outgoing invoices related to your projects.
• Use the filters, depending on your specific interest on what you are willing to focus on.

Incoming Invoices

• If you receive incoming invoicesfrom your vendor directly, please send them to mailto:accounting@parasol-island.com - Your invoice will than be placed into your project (area incoming invoices), waiting for your content approval.

Outgoing Invoices

• You create a outgoing invoice to your client in your project. Please download the invoice and send it to your client as ususaly.

OS/ Contacts

OS/ Contacts keeps all your contacts which are relevant for your business.

• OS/ Contacts distinguishes between companies and contact-persons
• Contact Persons with whom a business-relationship is existing, usually are assigned to a company
• meaning: If you have a business-relationship with a freelancer, please create a company-contact, using freelancers name
• Creating a new client is expecting you to define a client abbreviation for Project-IDs.
• Please create and use Tags, to specify and give more information to a single contact.
• Use filters by searching for specific contacts also support filtering by Tags

OS/ Reports

• OS/ Reports is the reporting engine of OS/. Depending on your user-rights, you get access to specific reports and your related projects, clients, department or companie.
• All reports are using powerful segments and filters, which helps you to get reports based on your individual needs, supporting different angles of your analysis.

Time Invest Report

• This is the place where you have full control about where timekeeping was made.
• As a projectowner, you will use the time invest report to control who tracked how much time on your projects
• As a Key Account Developer, you will probably choose your client, to see how much time is spend on your clients projects in total. Compare these workinghours spended on either client services projects or new business projects on your client

3rd Party Applications

Personio

• In Personio werden jegliche Arten von Abwesenheiten beantragt, genehmigt und abgebildet:

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Google Suite

Your email Signature

You can use this Parasol Signature Generator (written by ChatGPT) to create your signature. If you are not sure how to set the generated signature in Gmail, the following Gmail Help article will help you.

Gmail Help - Create a Gmail signature