Kimai tries to be as simple as possible, while leaving you as much freedom as possible in the way how you use it for your time-tracking. But this freedom comes with a price: the initial setup phase … you have to configure several settings, before you can track your first time record.
Let’s get started, so you can go back and concentrate on your real work, instead of configuring a software ;-)
bin/console
or in the login / registration form.Two points are important to understand before your start:
Customer
-> Project
-> Activity
which Kimai usesProject
and Activity
, those fields are mandatoryThis structure is used to allow all kinds of features, like customer based invoicing or project based reporting.
This leads us directly to the point of your initial content creation and configuration.
In order to record your first timesheets, you will create some entries for your company:
Customer
named My company
Project
named Internal
and link it to the Customer
named My Company
Activity
named Internal
and link it to the Project
named Internal
Open your user preferences (from the upper-left user drop-down menu) and configure the following settings:
Timezone
- set the timezone in which you are living, otherwise your records might show the wrong timesLanguage
- use Kimai in your language (if it doesn’t exist, consider to help translating it)The other options can be left as is for now, you can read more about them later here.
Now change to System
-> Settings
and configure the following settings:
Timesheet / Timetracking mode
- read more about the available “Tracking modes”User - default values
- if you are using Kimai in a multi-user environment, make sure these preferences are correct, as they apply to every user that did not yet update his preferences!All the other settings can be skipped for now and changed at a later point.
There are two functions, which should be checked right at the beginning for security reasons:
By default, user registration is enabled with auto activation, so everyone knowing the URL can register at your Kimai installation. If you use Kimai on a public server, you should change these settings!
Please read more in the User registration
chapter here and then adapt your
local.yaml if necessary.