Calendar integrations – setup recommendations based on use cases

If your team prefers to keep managing their events and meetings in an external calendar after implementing Scoro, you should consider enabling a respective integration to make sure all the important data still reaches Scoro for billing and reporting purposes. Before letting your team members integrate their Google or MS Exchange calendars, consider the following as an admin user:

• What’s the primary intent for enabling the sync, i.e. why is the integration necessary for your company and your team? 
• Does the integration need arise from an organization level or user level?
• How do you plan to use the synced data in Scoro? What for?

These answers will help you determine how to approach the setup as well as understand its potential limitations. As a result, it’s easier to set the right expectations and instruct your teams.

Below you can find our setup recommendations for the two most common use cases among the current Scoro users to get you started.

1. User needs the integration

The most common reason for integrating an external calendar is that your team members want to or need to access and manage their daily activities from two calendars simultaneously. This means it’s most important for the individual users to have the integration in place.

When to opt for this setup?

This approach to integration suits your company if your team meets most of the following characteristics:

1. Daily work is planned in Scoro.
2. Team is small in size (up to 5 persons).
3. Team members’ calendar preferences are split: some prefer to schedule and track events in the external calendar, while others move over to Scoro.
4. Calendar is not the main tool for planning or tracking work within your company. Not all team members need the integration.
5. Integration need comes from user level – meaning the company itself does not require everyone’s calendars to be synced. Rather, individual users wish to access their agendas from both calendars for convenience and flexibility. For example, maybe they prefer to use Scoro to plan out their work and tasks, but the external calendar to manage meetings and events on the go.

What do you gain from this setup?

Each team member can keep track of their upcoming events and meetings in their preferred calendar tool. It makes change management easier as there are fewer habits to break and everyone can stick to their own preferences.

In addition, thanks to the two-way sync, this solution ensures that any client meetings scheduled into the external calendar from any third-party tool get automatically synced to Scoro as well. For example: Your team uses Google Calendar. A client schedules a meeting from Outlook, which then gets synced to your team's Google Calendar. With the Google-Scoro integration enabled, the meeting is also synced to Scoro in turn. As a result, your team members won’t have to worry about adding it into Scoro manually to keep client meetings up to date in both calendars.

What’s the recommended configuration?

• Manage the calendar sync globally from the global settings and opt for the two-way sync. This allows users to manage events from both calendars. Once the team gets bigger, consider enforcing a global one-way sync for all users.
• Activate the integration simultaneously for all uses. Let all interested users connect their Google accounts first and then enable the sync for everyone at the same time. This helps to ensure that all events get synced to Scoro from the owner’s calendar, which means there’s less risk of bad data.
• Check for sync errors. After the sync is enabled, monitor potential sync issues using the 'Logs' column under the 'Users' tab. To see the individual log list, simply click on the error count or open the Logs tab.

What to communicate to the team?

• Instruct each user to connect their Google account. Inform them that the globally dictated two-way sync allows them to access their calendar from both Scoro and Google. The two-way sync allows for more individual flexibility but also requires more user awareness about integration limitations. So make sure your team knows where to find help materials on the integration.
• Ensure everyone connects their individual work calendars, not shared calendars or personal calendars.
• Instruct the team to pick one primary calendar. Even with the two-way sync, we still recommend doing most of the modifications in one calendar and letting the automatic sync handle the rest. Refrain from making changes in both calendars interchangeably, as this may cause data issues due to sync cycles and integration limitations.
• *For Exchange users only: all participants will be informed of every change made in Scoro via an update email because of MS Exchange’s own logic.

2. Organization needs the integration

Another common reason for integrating an external calendar is to ensure accurate time tracking for reporting and billing purposes. If your team members handle billable meetings and tasks in an external calendar, that data should also reach Scoro so nothing goes unbilled and no money gets left on the table. This means it’s important for the organization to have the integration in place.

Thanks to the ‘To Scoro’ sync direction, this solution also ensures that client meetings scheduled into the external calendar from any third-party tool get automatically synced to Scoro as well. For example: Your team uses Google Calendar. A client schedules a meeting from Outlook, which then gets synced to your team's Google Calendar. With the Google-Scoro integration enabled, the meeting is also synced to Scoro in turn. As a result, your team members won’t have to worry about adding it into Scoro manually to keep client meetings up to date in both calendars.

When to opt for this setup?

This is the right approach for your company if your team meets most of the following characteristics:

1. Calendar is the primary time-logging tool.
2. Most of the meetings count as billable hours.
3. Team members prefer an external calendar for managing their schedules.
4. The team is big in size, and central integration management is needed to ensure consistency in time-logging and data sync.
5. Integration need comes from the organization level – the company needs to ensure that all information about billable work is reflected in Scoro as well.
6. Recurring events are mostly created on the client side, i.e by external organizers.

What do you gain from this setup?

If team members log their billable meetings into the external calendar rather than the Scoro one, the integration helps you ensure that relevant info reaches Scoro and that all billable hours get indeed billed. You minimize data and revenue loss. 

In addition, pulling all the logged hours from Google into Scoro makes operational reporting more accurate. The calendar data will feed into the Utilization report, which lets you track team utilization levels and capacity. Additionally, you can analyze billable vs non-billable hours in the detailed work report, track actual labor costs on a project level, etc. 

What’s the recommended configuration?

• Use global settings to manage the integration centrally and predefine the setup for the whole team. Global settings let you dictate the sync direction and status mapping across all users. This helps to prevent bad data in Scoro.
• Enforce one-way sync ‘To Scoro’. One-way sync means fewer complications. It’s easier to understand how things work and how to get the best value out of the integration. It’s also easier to communicate it internally to the team – everyone should just manage, edit, add, and delete meetings in the external calendar and let the sync handle the rest. It keeps things simpler for the team and prevents misunderstandings and data manipulation from both ends.
• Ensure all team members have the correct accounts connected. Open the 'Users' tab for a full overview of connected accounts. Make sure all team members have connected their relevant Google accounts before enabling the sync. This helps to ensure team members are ready and have taken the necessary steps on their end. If someone seems to have connected the wrong calendar, ask them to disconnect and switch over to the correct one.
• Activate the integration simultaneously for all uses. This means you should first disable the global sync, set everything up, invite users to connect their Google accounts, and only then enable the sync globally. This ensures that all events get synced to Scoro from the owner’s calendar, and there’s less risk of bad data.
• Enable the sync before the weekend. Since there will be a lot of data to sync initially, the sync can take a few hours or even a day, depending on the number of users and collective events. Therefore, it’s wise to enable the migration on a Friday evening to ensure it doesn't disrupt your workflows.
• Check for sync errors. After the sync is enabled, monitor potential sync issues using the 'Logs' column under the 'Users' tab. To see the individual log list, simply click on the error count or open the Logs tab.

What to communicate to the team?

Proper global setup alone is not enough, each individual team member also needs to do their part.

• Instruct team members to connect their individual work calendars, not shared calendars or personal calendars.
• Agree on the exact date when the global sync will be enabled, so users know when they need to have their accounts connected. Also, communicate clearly from which date onwards the data will be synced, so the team knows which data needs to be clean (i.e. you may decide to set the sync start date to the beginning of the month retrospectively).
• Set up a separate process for linking synced events with activity types and projects. The external calendar events won’t have any activity types or projects linked to them, but this data is important for reporting and billing purposes. The easiest way to link synced events with activity types and projects is to use bulk actions in the detailed work report. For example, you can create a recurring reminder for each team member to go over their detailed work report at the end of each week and link all billable events to correct projects and activity types.
  
  
• *For Exchange users only: recurring events still need to be created in Scoro because Scoro-Exchange integration doesn’t currently support syncing of recurring events from Exchange to Scoro.