What is the hierarchy across the Lotus ecosystem?

Within the Lotus ecosystem, there’s a hierarchy of all the pieces. This guide is to help them make sense.

Clients

At the top of the hierarchy are Clients. A Client represents your clients. They are used as a grouping mechanism for Buckets so that you can report at a client level of everything below it. A Bucket must be linked to a Client. A client can have one or multiple Buckets.

You can also have Sub-Clients. These sit below a Client and are intended for when you have a more complex client which requires you to report for different areas of the business separately, such as when they have different businesses or business lines, or if your client wants state-based reporting.

Buckets

Buckets are where time is captured. A Bucket must be linked to a Client or Sub-Client. The term ‘bucket’ is meant to be a general way to refer to something that holds stuff which, in this case, is time. A bucket can represent many things, including:

• A project or other discrete piece of work
• Retainer work
• Ongoing operational work
• A type of deliverable for a client, be it phone calls, a common type of deliverable for the client
• Any other way you’d like to group time

Lotus uses keywords and learnings from you as you go along to identify when your time should go into each Bucket. You help guide the ship as you go along to make sure the learnings are correct as well.

Jobs

Jobs are only applicable for the mobile app. A Job is very similar to a Bucket in that it must be linked to a Client, that it captures time and has tasks connected to it, however a job has a physical location associated with it to enable to geo-location functionality of the app to work. Jobs are allocated to mobile users so that when they arrive on-site, they are auto-checked in and their time is recorded.

The mobile app also allows users to add notes to Jobs for reference.

Tasks

Tasks are a way of labelling the time that goes into a Bucket. Tasks aren’t required, but if you do have Tasks then these are per Bucket.

When working on something, if there are standard things you do such as phone calls, support requests, bug fixing, or anything else, Tasks are a great way of categorising the time within the Bucket so that when you look at it down the line, you know what it was used for.

Tasks also allow for free text commentary to provide more specific notes on what the time was used for.