Time tracking per ticket

Time tracking is off as a factory setting. While it is off there is no field and no column. The “Time spent” card in the report then only appears if time was logged in the chosen period.

A dead field would be worse than none at all, so the feature disappears completely instead of sitting there greyed out.

The switch sits under “Settings → General” on the card “Time tracking per ticket” and is called “Enable time tracking”.

Every team then takes part. To leave one out you switch it off on the team itself, under “Settings → Teams” in the “Team details” box.

A company with an internal IT team and a customer-facing team often needs it only for the second one.

If you switch time tracking off again later, the entries that exist stay readable and exportable — they are a basis for invoicing, not a convenience. Nothing new can be logged. Existing entries can then no longer be changed or deleted either.

The ticket carries a card called “Time spent”. “Log time” opens the input.

Quick buttons sit next to the field: one click on “30m” logs thirty minutes. Which buttons appear is set in the settings.

The “Duration” field also takes free input: “90” is ninety minutes, “1.5h” is an hour and a half, and so is “1h 30m”. A number without a unit is always minutes.

Input the system does not fully understand is rejected. “1h in the evening” does not become an entry of one hour — it becomes an error message.

In “What for (optional)” you write what the time was for. The text travels into the export and does not appear in the ticket history.

Several agents log time on the same ticket. Every entry carries its day, its note and the name of the person who did the work.

Time is logged onto a day, not onto a clock time. The input has a date field for this that starts with today; to fill in yesterday you pick the day before there. A day in the future is not accepted. A clock time would claim a precision the input does not have.

For long sessions there is a stopwatch on the ticket: “Start timer” starts it, “Pause” holds it.

The stopwatch never creates an entry by itself. It proposes the elapsed time, and nothing is saved until you press the “Log …” button that names the time. What gets logged is the time that has actually run.

It replaces mental arithmetic, not knowledge. Without it the feature is complete, because typing the value is the actual path.

Opening another ticket pauses the running stopwatch, and the new ticket tells you which ticket it is attached to. If time that has not been logged is still waiting on another ticket and you start the stopwatch here, the application asks first. The “Start timer” question offers “Log …” for the time on the other ticket, “Discard” and “Cancel”. It appears from one minute of elapsed time.

A hidden window is not a break. The stopwatch keeps running if you merely click away.

Against a stopwatch left running overnight there is a maximum runtime. The value is capped, never discarded, and the agent is told.

The stopwatch is off as a factory setting. You find it in the settings under “Stopwatch on the ticket”.

Every entry carries a “Billable” switch. The time is logged once, and the switch decides whether it goes onto the invoice.

That is why the ticket can show two totals: everything logged on the left, the billable sum on the right. The second total only appears when it differs from the first.

There is no separate type for goodwill. Goodwill, warranty work and internal rework are called different things in every company, and the system knows only the one distinction that money hangs on.

This is how you log goodwill: enter the time as usual, switch “Billable” off and write the reason in the note.

The entry then visibly carries “not billable”. The minutes stay in the logged total, because the work did happen.

Anybody who does not log the time at all loses the very number that later explains why a customer was charged so little.

If most of your work is not billable, turn the default around with the switch “New entries are billable by default”.

As a factory setting everything is billed to the minute. Anybody who bills in quarter hours sets two values.

“Rounding increment (minutes)” is the step. Every entry is rounded up to the next multiple.

“Minimum per entry (minutes)” is the floor. Every entry is billed with at least this value.

The two work one after the other: first the floor, then the step. With a floor of 20 and a step of 15, five minutes become thirty, because the result has to satisfy both.

Below the two fields stands a sample sentence with your own values. It is calculated, not claimed.

Only the billed value is ever rounded, and only per entry — never the total. Two small entries are therefore rounded up twice.

The logged time stays untouched. Changing the rounding later falsifies no old data, because the value is worked out when it is shown.

You see both on the entry: where rounding changes the value, the result stands next to it in brackets.

A service provider often wants no ticket closed without logged time. There is a switch for that.

It is called “Require a time entry before resolving or closing” and is off as a factory setting.

It applies only when a person changes the status, and only to people who may log time. It also applies when a reply template sets the status on a single ticket. An agent without an entry gets a message and the ticket stays open.

Auto-close, merging and bulk actions are never blocked. Otherwise there would be tickets nobody can close any more.

This is the most dangerous switch of the whole feature. Only turn it on once your team really logs time every time.

The ticket list gets a “Time” column showing how much has already been logged on a case.

You do not switch it on. It appears as soon as time tracking is on. Only agents and administrators see it. You can remove it from your list with “Columns”.

On narrow windows it is one of the first to drop out again. The list then keeps the columns without which a ticket cannot be found.

Time that only stands on a single ticket is no basis for an invoice. That is why the report page carries a “Time spent” card. Only people with the “Time tracking: see the report” permission see the card.

Four numbers stand at the top: logged, billed, the number of entries and the number of tickets that carry any time at all.

That last number is the most important one after the total. Forty hours on three out of five hundred tickets is not an evaluation — it is three agents who are the only ones logging.

Below that come the breakdowns: by requester, by team, by category and by day.

On top of that comes one table per custom field. That is the road to billing by company or cost centre: you create a custom field, fill it in on the ticket, and the report groups by it.

The period at the top of the page applies to the day the work was done. July work on a June ticket therefore stands in the July report.

A note below the export buttons deserves to be taken seriously: the figures come from entries made by people and from your rounding rules. They are a working basis, not an audited invoice.

Three buttons sit below the card. They deliver the individual entries, not the totals from the page. They contain exactly the entries that match your filters.

These are two recipients, not three file formats. “Export entries (CSV)” and “Export entries (Excel)” go to accounting: both are complete and are never truncated.

“Export entries (PDF)” is the document for a human being. It goes to the customer as an attachment to the invoice. The PDF has no column for the note.

The PDF is capped at 20,000 entries, and the document says so itself. Nobody reads an invoice with more lines than that anyway.

All three files are built from the same source: filters, rounding, columns and figures exist once, so the three cannot drift apart.

An entry that is not billable has an empty cell in the billable column, not a zero. A zero would be summed up in a pivot table.

If “Per-agent evaluation” of time tracking is off, the “Agent” column is missing from all three files. If your licence falls back to Basic, the existing entries stay readable and exportable.

A customer never sees the time entries, not even on their own ticket.

This is not a setting but a lock in the server. There is no switch that opens it.

The reason sits in the entries themselves: notes are written for the team. They say what went wrong and how long the search for the cause took.

Other systems of this kind do the same. Where time reaches the customer, it reaches them as a document.

That is what the PDF export is for: it goes out with the invoice and not onto the ticket in the customer portal.

The report can additionally show who logged how much. As a factory setting it does not.

Time per person is performance data, and in many companies the works council has a say in it.

The switch is called “Per-agent evaluation” and sits in the settings.

While it is off the server does not even deliver the figures. The table is not hidden — it does not exist.

That difference matters. A lock that only the display knows about is not a lock.