Centeam

Videos 20 September 2022

We made a new page with some videos that try to explain the concepts and workings of Centeam.

1. Intro: Management of users, costs and payments.
2. Jars and tallies: Management of a common fridge, washing machines and even a piggy bank.

Soon, also Videos about the meals and shop module.

The last few weeks we crushed some bugs and modified some features:

• Costs: When you open a cost, you can now link to the jar and occupants sheet
• Costs: In some overviews costs with a negative value were not shown.
• Meals: The option was added to supply a wanted number of dishwashers. People can apply when subscribing.
• Payments: When a part of a splitted payment is removed, its counterpart will also be removed. The original payment will appear again.

Updates July 2022 08 July 2022

• When occupant costs are recaulculated in the background, you don't have te refresh the page yourself. This happens automatically now.
• On the owner costs page a History button was added, showing a graph totalling the costs per year.
• When there are open meals, these are shown on the dashboard.
• It's now possible for a cooking crew to add subscriptions themselves (editing and deleting was already possible).
• The birth days on the dashboard have been reworked.
• The linking of paymens can now also link payments where the amount is equal to that of a cost and where the name of the other party is contained in the name of the cost.
• When while linking a payment is found with the message "owner costs unit XX" a linked cost is added to the active occupants cost sheet making sure Unit XX is more 'in the green'.
• An export wwas added for all budgets.
• The currency that your project uses can be changed in the settings (EUR, GPB, USD)
• While adding (or editing) a cost, you can now see the calculated values of the cost real time next to the fields of the distribution keys.
• The layout of the owner costs buffer and occupants costs balance info on the dashboard was improved.
• ...

Meals and other things 28 June 2022

The organisation of common meals can become more difficult than it should be. The meals module in Centeam allows for managing the subscriptions (adults vs children), for the different variations (vegan, meat ...) of the meal you and your crew choose to prepare.

When your done, add the costs and select for each which variations the cost applied. Centeam will do the calculation for you..

The meals module is off by default but can be enabled by the admins in the settings

Also:

• Admins can now select any unit when adding a cost. Normal users can still only select their own unit and the ACO.
• The owner costs page was revised a bit.
• On the occupants costs page, the column with your unit is now marked in a different color.
• There is an extra setting to hide or show the balance of your bank account on the dashboard. Showing the balance is only interesting when you linked all the costs of your bank account to a cost in Centeam.

Update Juin 2022 14 June 2022

Lots of updates!

• Some items from the main navigation (search, settings, help, logs) were moved to the top navigation.
• Added search functionality to the payments page.
• On top of the payments page a button 'History' was added. This shows a graph with the full payment history.
• A similar graph was added to each jar!
• The cost search (now in the top navigation) has been improved and works like the search for payments.
• An extra counter is visible for admins for unlinked payments.
• The Unpaid costs page has been reworked. You now also see costs where the amount that was paid does not match the amount of the cost.
• A simple search was added to the persons page.
• When adding a cost, non-admins can now choose the jar too.
• When adding a cost admins can now approve in one go.
• When a page generates an error, it will now display a nicer error.
• The linking of costs to a payment is made easier with an extra searchfield for selecting the cost.
• Also, a lot of bugs were squashed

Multiple units (and projects) per user 10 June 2022

From now on, it's possible to link multiple units to one user. In most cases because a user is owner of multiple units. To link extra units to a user, go to the Persons page, and open the user. There you will see the possibility to add more units.

It is even possible for a user to have multiple units across projects. The admins of the different projects don't have to do anything special. Just add the users with the e-mailadres and Centeam will make the link. This can also be interesing for multiple cohousing projects that also belong to a general ACO. Image you have three related projects. You registrer four projects. One for each project and an extra one for the general ACO. In this project you mannualy add all users and units of the three separate project.

The result is that users that belong to multiple projects or have multiple units will see a menu on top for switching between these projects or units.

"Plnr" becomes "Centeam" 01 June 2022

For the past five years, ‘Centeam' was called ‘Plnr'. This original name came from its original goal: create a do-it-all tool for cohousings. Soon it became clear that this was a little bit too ambitious but also not necessary. There are lots of tools to communicate, share files, plan activities, video calling ...

The only thing that we couldn't find a decent tool for was the finances of our project Cohousing Kerselaar. Until then it was a labour intensive soup consisting of Excel, Shared folders, LibreOffice, Google Spreadsheets ...

So the focus of Plnr-development quickly went in the direction of finances. Thanks to a rather long Corona quarantine and a sabbatical the time was found to finish the tool so it could be used by other cohousings.

Because the tool is now mainly finance-focused, a new name was called for. Eventually we decided to not make it too difficult and chose 'Centeam', the name we use ourselves for our own financial team in Cohousing Kerselaar.

Together with this change other changes happend as well:

• Centeam is now also available in in English. This is a project based on the setting that only admins can change.
• On the page with old occupant costs the start and end date is shown.
• The interface of the shop is better integrated.
• The automatic linking of payments to costs is now case-insensitive
• It's now possible to make an export of budgets
• Bugfix: The log of a payment was incomplete until now.
• Bugfix: Detection whether a cost was paid is improved.
• Bugfix: In some cases when sheets were not reculculated when they should have been (e.g. when creating a cost from a payment).