Configuring Organization Settings

Organization Settings is where the owner makes the decisions that apply to the whole organization: which features are available, how dates and weeks display, what people can do on the Time Flow board, and what appears on invoices. You set all of it under Settings → General, and most of it is worth deciding before you invite the team. This guide covers the decisions in order: which features to enable before anyone arrives, which settings bind everyone and which are defaults people can change, and the backlog decision, which you set with three switches in two places.

Choosing features before you invite anyone

Under Enabled Features on the Application tab, you choose which parts of AbleTime your organization uses. Anything you leave unchecked is hidden from everyone, including the first person you invite, so make this choice before you send invitations.

• Time Flow — the planning surface: Ledger, Flow Board, Timeline, and the rest of the planning screens.

• Billing — invoicing. Enable it if you bill clients for time.

• Dashboard — the organization-wide Dashboard.

Start with the features the team will actually use. If you enable a feature later, it appears in everyone's sidebar; nothing else changes.

Two more organization-wide choices sit on the same tab. With Date Format (Locale) you choose how dates render: under System Default they render the way each person's browser is set, while MM/dd/yyyy, 12h and dd/MM/yyyy, 24h put the whole organization on one format. Pick a fixed format when reports and invoices pass between people who would read 04/05 two different ways. Under User Management, with Enable User Invites on, people other than the owner can send invitations; the owner can invite either way. Turn on Enable Bulk Invites to invite from a list, for bringing in a whole team at once.

On the General tab, you fill in Organization Name and Contact Email; both are required.

The time-entry calendar

On the Time Tracker tab, you set the defaults for every member's time-entry calendar. Two of these settings are starting points people can change; the other three bind everyone.

Week Starts On (Sunday or Monday) and Show Weekend by Default are the changeable ones: if you leave weekends off here, each person can still turn them back on from their own calendar. Set both to match how your organization works.

The other three apply to everyone. Leave Enable Timers on unless the team only records time after the fact. With Description required on, no one can save a time entry without a note; turn it on when you will need the note later, on an invoice or in a review. Default Minute Increment is the snap interval on the calendar grid; choose it by how fine-grained you want time entries to be. The remaining fields are covered on Time Tracker Settings.

The backlog decision

You set the backlog policy with three switches in two places. They cover one decision, so decide it once and set all three together. You can read more about Backlog here.

Enable Backlog on the Time Flow tab adds a Backlog column for work that's tracked but not yet in the active flow; backlog items don't appear on the Gantt view, because unscheduled work has no dates. With Allow Backlog Hours on (nested under it, and available only when Backlog is on), people can log time against that unscheduled work. With Include backlog hours in billing on, over on the Billing tab, that time appears on invoices.

Set the three the same way. If people can log backlog hours but billing excludes them, that work never appears on an invoice; if billing includes backlog hours but no one can log them, the billing switch does nothing. Turn all three on if you bill backlog time, and leave all three off if you don't.

Structuring the board

With the rest of the Time Flow tab, you choose how much structure to put on the board.

• Enable Epics — grouping of related items under a shared outcome; requires Backlog. This is a Pro-plan feature.

• Capacity Planning — capacity types on people and tasks, for planning against the team's available capacity. Also Pro.

• Show Budget Fields — budget fields on projects and milestones, for organizations that plan money alongside time.

• Enable Stages — named sub-stages inside Backlog and Doing, so you can mirror your process steps on the board. Once saved, Stages appears under Settings; you manage the stage names there.

Exclude Weekends From Durations is a different setting from Show Weekend by Default on the previous tab. With Show Weekend by Default on, Saturday and Sunday appear on the time-entry calendar; with Exclude Weekends From Durations on, weekend days don't count toward item durations on the board. Time Entry Filtering, which narrows the task list people pick from when they log time, is covered on Time Flow Settings.

Invoice appearance

The Billing tab applies only when Billing is among the enabled features. Apart from the backlog switch above, it holds what clients see at the top of your invoices. Invoice Logo prints in the invoice header, auto-sized to it (200×64px at most; JPEG, PNG, or WebP up to 2MB), alongside the Company Name you enter here. Prefix, tax, currency, address, and the remaining invoice fields are covered on Billing Settings.

The audit trail

When your plan includes it, the Exports tab has Download Audit Log: you download a CSV of time-entry audit rows for the past one, two, or three months. The rows record who changed which time entries, for when compliance or a dispute needs that history. The broader data export (time entries, projects, clients, and users) isn't available yet.

With the tabs saved, invite the team from Settings → Personnel; the settings you chose here already apply to everyone you invite. Field-level detail for every setting on these tabs is on General Settings, Application Settings, Time Tracker Settings, Time Flow Settings, Billing Settings, and Exports.