A project in Calpendo can be thought of as a body of work which you wish to track your bookings against. This may be for billing purposes, tracking who is using your equipment, or to control who is able to make bookings at various times.
A user can only make a booking with projects that they are members of and which have a status of Approved. This article will discuss the various status options on a project and what they mean.
Status Options
Draft
This status would be used by someone filling in information on a new project who does not yet want to submit it to Admin for approval.
Requested
In a standard Calpendo, projects are created with a status of Requested. When the user saves their project, it will be listed in the 'Project Requests' report on the Admin menu, where an administrator can go to check the details and approve it for use. While in this status, the owner of the project is able to edit the project fields.
Approved
Only administrators can set a project to Approved. Once approved, a project is available to be used for making bookings. Usually most fields cannot now be updated by the owner.
Restricted
A project with a Restricted status can be used to make bookings by Admins and by the Resource Manager of a resource. However it cannot be used by standard users.
Denied/Unbookable/Terminated
These are three statuses which do not allow bookings to be made against the project. Typically Denied would be used when it has been decided the project is not going to be accepted for making bookings. Unbookable is for a project such as the Template Project which is designed never to be used for bookings. Terminated would be used for a project that has run to completion and has bookings made against it but should no longer be used for new bookings.
Approving Projects
By default, only people with the Administrator role are able to change the status of a project to Approved. A list of requested projects can be found using the Project Requests item on the Admin menu.
To approve a project, select it in the list, edit it, and change the status to 'Approved'.
Changing the Default Initial Status
By default, projects are created with a status of Requested. This works well for facilities with simple projects with only a few fields, where a user is likely to fill in all the details in one go and then await approval of the project from admin. However some facilities hold a large amount of information on their projects, including documentation such as ethics approval and risk assessments. In this instance you might want projects to be initially created with the Draft status so they do not appear on the Admin list of projects awaiting approval until the user is happy they have completed all the sections, at which point they can manually set the status to Requested.
This can be set on the Global Preferences menu item, on the Admin menu by changing the Default Project Status to Draft.
