Automatic Hourly Totals and Earnings

There have been several times since I stopped developing the online version of Dash (previously known as Vimsio), where I almost added a small feature, just because it would be helpful to me on a personal level. I was largely successful in resisting those urges, but now that I am building out my app version, it’s open-season on many of those features. There are several use-cases that arise regularly as a freelance web designer and developer that I would like to support, including:

1. I need to to ensure that I make enough money each week to cover my various bills and living expenses. since I can add an hourly rate to each tag I use in my schedule, it’s pretty easy to get my current weekly earnings calculated. This functionality existed in my original web-based version, but not in a way that was easily visible-it required a couple clicks to see the data. In this version, I wanted to create a way to have this information clearly visible directly on the page.
2. For those clients that I’m contractually obligated to give a specific minimum number of hours to each week, I wanted an easy way to quickly see who I stand. Again, the functionality existed in the previous version, but it required too many clicks to see. I want an easy way to just automatically collect and present this data
3. For some projects (like flat-fee tasks) I have a maximum number of hours that I can bill a client for. Making it as easy as possible to see this information at a glance would be extremely helpful.

I still have quite a bit of refinement to do, but I have an initial working prototype set up so I can create a new tile to track a specific metric, like total weekly billable hours, project-specific hours, per client weekly hours, and monthly hours based on a specific tag. In this initial first step, the interface isn’t quite there. I would love to have some nice graphs or donut charts, but for now, I’m just calculating the specifed total, and displaying it in a nice large font, because at least large fonts look cool. I’m also just dropping the necessary setup variables directly into the database. Of course if I ever make this available to others, I’ll have to create a nice user interface for adding and editing the various configuration options.

For now, this is enough to let me test things out, think about future improvements, and use the functionality, which is extremely helpful with my day job.