worked days calculations --

There are a number of reports that do calculations based on an employee's output (hours worked, tickets processed, etc.) per day (or number of days). For instance, the "Annual Hours Summary by Employee" report calculates an average hours per day which would be useful except the system does not count days worked with zero hours clocked/billed.

Can we get a mechanism in place where CommitCRM actually tracks days worked which is separate from how it currently does it? Maybe a simple time tracking mechanism where they could enter "clocked-in" and "clocked-out" times. We have been looking at 3rd pary software to track this kind of thing (e.g. klok, toggl, etc.) but we would MUCH rather have this integrated with commit!

thanks --

//ray

Thank you for posting this. RangerMSP's time tracking features are designed towards billing and are there to help you capture more billable time. Many times it is used to track employees time regardless of billing purposes. We do have some items on our list in this direction and I will add this feedback to it. Thanks.

Commit, you are just cutting and pasting answers used in other questions without actually reading what I'm saying!

I don't want CommitCRM to track all time for employees but we DO need it to at least understand if an employee was at work but had no billable hours else the calculations become useless!!

What is needed is a simple check box in a calendar to let CommitCRM know if an employee was at work or not (each day).

//ray

What many users do is log time entries (as not-billable Charges) under their own business account. This way time is logged but not billed and employee time based reports will sum these not-billable hours as well.

We can't do that because ALL time we enter into CommitCRM eventually is marked as billable (then eventually marked as billed). It's just easier to process time on this basic notion (I honestly don't know how larger shops make it work without losing large amounts of billable time not doing it this way). In addition, because CommitCRM can't do time tracking (time management) very well, we decided a long time ago that CommitCRM would just track all our billable time, which works well enough. The problem is that there are days when techs don't have billable time to enter.

What is needed is a mechanism to track if an employee was at work which is independent of billable time. I'm not exactly sure what the easiest way to do this would be -- maybe a checkbox for each employee in the calendar?

//ray

Following our previous suggestion above consider opening a 'dummy' block of money contract under your business account. Set any amount, it does not matter and it won't get billed or anything. This will serve as the default contract for time entries logged as charges under your business account. So, all employees can log the time under your business account and all such time entries will be set automatically as Not Billable (because of the 'dummy' contract you assigned).

Hope this helps and thanks for your continuous feedback.

Again, that's not going to work and in fact touches on another feature that we have been waiting for; Custom Contracts. We need to be able to have ALL charges automatically mark as "unbillable"... been told that this is "in the works" for over 4 years now...

Anyhow, the point is that CommitCRM is only used for billable work. Period. We do NOT enter anything into the system that does not ultimately get marked as billable (and billed). This allows us to instantly see what hasn't been billed and clean up our charges on a global scale. The way we are doing it works well and we don't want to break that process. All we are trying to do is get CommitCRM to properly report statistics.

What you are describing is a workaround to have CommitCRM become a time tracking system but as we all know, CommitCRM is not designed to do this (we have moved all those functions to Toggl and can't say enough about it). What I'm suggesting is a method (perhaps a check box) that an employee can do each day that tells CommitCRM "yes, I worked this day". I understand that ultimately this is not going to happen which means that all the reports which are based on hours worked/day are inaccurate and useless for our needs.

//ray

raymond, we don't think that we've ever said about it being 'in the works', what we say is that we evaluate the feedback, consider it, review it. And we do. However, we never say or promise to deliver something and don't. Sometimes we're being criticized for not promising new features but we prefer to be on this side than saying that something is coming and it won't (not in the near future anyway).

RangerMSP was designed to help you bill more, track and manage time when it comes to billing and capture more billable time in general.

Your feedback here about having employees tick a check-box 'I worked this day' will be logged and considered, however, a non-official first impression for the sake of discussion is that it will require more work from employees (remembering to tick it each day) and in real-life such solutions/features end up covered with 'dust' as no one use them. But, we do get what you're trying to achieve here, so maybe we'll come up with something else.

Again, thanks for your continuous and valuable feedback.

Perhaps an easier solution to manage would be to log if the staff member actually logged in to CommitCRM at all on that day.

Reflecting on this even more, we are coming to the conclusion that a tick box is exactly what is needed to make the reports more accurate. The check box should be marked as something like "count as work day" and can be checked by the employee or management.

The issue is that for the calculations, we want to include full days worked but exclude part time days. For instance, if an employee works Monday through Friday but only bills time Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (4 hours each day), currently the system will calculate an average of 4hrs/day but in fact the employee has only worked 2.4hrs/day. Now to add to the mix, if the employee takes an emergency call on Saturday and bills another hour, we definitely don't want to penalize them by now adding Saturday into the equation (which would calculate to 2.17hrs/day). Instead, these "bonus" hours should simply add to their total w/o adding the day (13 hours over 5 days = 2.6hrs/day).

What needs to be understood is that we have moved away from just needing a tool to track billable time to needing a system that can help us understand workflow, employee effectiveness and overall business health. It's the little additions like what we are talking about here that allows the system to be more than just a time tracker.

thanks!

//ray

Thank you for the additional and detailed information.