What is the purpose of "Add Predefined Category"?

Tony Platts

I need to add approximately 50 categories to 30 projects over the weekend. That's 1500 cut and paste actions. I'm not looking forward to it.

There is a button marked "Add Predefined Category" and that seems to make sense until you consider how you predefine those categories.

Adding predefined categories in the Account Settings > Time & Fee Categories automatically adds the predefined category to every phase on every project whether you want it or not.

There's no other configuration options to prevent this so I cannot use the functionality because I don't want those categories on every project.

Two questions then;

1. What's that button for?
2. Does anyone know of a way to add 50 categories to 50% of my projects quickly and efficiently?

Brian_Richardson

I tested this - when I added a test category in Account Settings, it did not add that category automatically to any project. It simply defined the category and made it available when pressing the "Add predefined category" option in the project profile.

For the bulk update, do you have access to Bridge or another integration/API tool? If so then you can probably do this more easily in bulk by building a workflow. Here's the RM API documentation for Budget Item Categories. The doc isn't really clear but I've found you can play around with these endpoints and usually get them to do what you want:

https://10kft.github.io/10kft-api/#budget-item-categories

If that's not an option for you, then I'm afraid you're in for a long hand-editing session. Sorry.

Tony Platts

Well, I completed this task today. There's a shortcut in that the Add Predefined Category has an "Add all task" tucked behind it.

I removed all my predefined categories and put them in a spreadsheet, added the ones I wanted to add to the projects, went through each project in turn and added them all using the predefined categories, then replaced the original ones in the main admin panel. It took about 90 minutes.

We're coming from a timesheet tool called Tenrox. The insult to the injury was that I went in and used their bulk admin tool to extract all the categories and then to close them down. Took about 90 seconds.