Time Tracking Frustrations!

"Begin Rant"

After years of using CommitCRM I am finally at wits end. Why has there been no improvements regarding Time Tracking? I believe its safe to say that the most commonly billed item is TIME! As well, the most easily overlooked item is TIME! Those with employees have further frustration given the need to track multiple employees time and then try to compare it to billed time.

A simple search of this forum will yield dozens of requests and questions regarding time tracking. Yet to date, no efforts appear to have been spent on remedying this severe oversight on Commit's part. Although Commit's support has offered numerous options to "work around" this blatant omission, none are truly functional.

We are all at the root of our business's a SERVICE business, which means we sell our time. Therefore it stands to reason that TIME should be the most important thing to track, correct?

"End Rant"

I think I have come up with what I hope is a simple solution. However, it may require some development fromCommitCRM.

CommitCRM already has the Timer, start time, end time, and duration fields on the charges screen. Why can't these be re-purposed to use for actual time tracking. The user would have the option of using the timer, entering a start and end time, or simply entering time used (duration). After which they can copy that time to the billable time or enter what they want for billable.

Some nice additional features would be: The option to require this field for labor items, or at least display an annoying reminder that the field is empty. It would also be nice if we could set these times to default to the nearest 1/4 hour (we use 1/4 hour increments).

With this solution we would need a couple of reports at a minimum. I have listed some ideas below:

1) Daily & Weekly total time per employee, with ticket numbers & time logged (this can be used by employees to verify they logged all their time that day)

2) total time for all employees, with day and time logged. Similar to existing Monthly Hours Summary by employee but with the ability to specify the date range. (this could be used as a timesheet for payroll purposes too)

3) total time vs billable time with percentage of billable time to actual. per employee for ?? date range (this would be invaluable in evaluating employee performance)

4) update numerous existing reports that show billable time and add the actual time as well.

Unfortunately, we rarely use the web interface due to its many faults and therefor I am not sure how this could be further implemented there. Another possibility would be for each user to have a display of their total time on the dashboard. The display duration could be set in options. This would also assist employees with identifying when total time has not been entered. It may further be possible to integrate this with numerous other aspects withinCommitCRM.

What do you all think?
Chad

Another benefit might be to add "Time Description" field below the time area of the charge. This field could also be further copied to the billing field.

As well a line or some sort of visual separation between the actual time logged and the time billed would be nice.

Thanks for posting this!

Some nice additional features would be: The option to require this field for labor items, or at least display an annoying reminder that the field is empty. It would also be nice if we could set these times to default to the nearest 1/4 hour (we use 1/4 hour increments).

Exactly for this purpose we added the new Quick Charge panel for Tickets (available in version 6.0 or above) - the user only needs to select time interval from the list (for example, last 15 min) and type the charge description. The Charge start/end times and billed-hours amount will be filled automatically.

As for improvements in reports and adding new reports:

update numerous existing reports that show billable time and add the actual time as well.

In all Charge reports the Start and End times can be included when you customize and design the report. For what it worth the 'Technical Service Form including Charges' formats already include these fields.
We will evaluate including them in additional system reports.

"Time Description" field below the time area of the charge

Noted and will be considered.

I fully agree and we are also very frustrated with really NO way to properly track all of our technician/employee time! We need a proper way integrated into CommitCRM that will create reports for each tech and his time whether on-site or in the office (they are paid different rates). PLEASE add this feature soon!

As always thank you for your response "CommitCRM Support" but i think you are missing the point. We need to be able to track the "Duration" of time. Then we need to be able to pull that information in a number of formats.

The "Duration" of time whether entered via timer, start-stop, or directly in the "Duration" box would and could be different than the billed time. Thus it would be a VERY useful bit of information that could be used as a way of tracking ACTUAL TIME. Then it could be used in reports for comparison to billable and non billable time.

There are 4 fundamental things as a Service company that I need to track. Actual Time, Billable Time, Non Billable Time, and Parts. CommitCRM only accommodates 2 of these easily, that being billable time and parts. Yes I know i can run reports for Non-billable time vs billable but it is of little use without the knowledge of the ACTUAL TIME spent on a charge.

Chad

Pyro,

I fully agree, although I am less concerned with where the time was spent in my case. However I can easily see my proposed fix being used for your purpose as well.

Come onCommitCRM..this would be of such a great benefit to all employers. I can not imagine it would be that difficult to re-purpose the Duration field (or add another similar) and modify/add a few reports.

I just want to bring this back to the top for more discussion.

I simply despise the thought that many (most) of us are entering billable time in CommitCRM and actual time in another program. Or we have to edit the times after the fact. Then use multiple reports from different software packages to verify technicians billable time vs actual time.

I can not fathom this being that difficult to implement on Commit's side. Then we could get down to some real time comparisons and reporting.

Feedback noted. Thanks.

I'd like to bump this conversation... we are now at the point where we need to understand what all our techs are doing with their time -- in particular, the actual time vs. non-billable time. We don't want to use tickets/charges to do this tracking as it will completely screw up the canned reports and is simply overkill. We are not looking for a micro-management tool that will take them hours to keep current and accurate -- a simple time tracking function similar to how an instant messaging client reports point of presence would work... something that can be quickly toggled between general tasks like "personal", "travel", "meeting", "documentation", etc. The tool would then aggregate the information into useful information.

We are evaluating 3rd party solutions (e.g. toggl, klok, etc.) so that employees can clock-in and track their day in a much more general way. Commit, take a look at these applications and give it some thought as having a true time tracking solution that is directly integrated with the CRM would be idea.

Thanks!

//ray

+1 from me guys, time tracking would make my life easier...

Thank you for posting this. Your feedback is noted. As just posted in another thread, RangerMSP's time tracking features are designed towards billing and are there to help you capture more billable time though many times it is used to track employees time regardless of billing purposes. Thanks.

For those that are interested, we have moved our time tracking over to toggl and can't say enough about how much we are benefiting from using it. This cloud based app is a true time tracking/management app which is super simple and cheap (free up to 5 persons then $5/person/month). What we are discovering is that toggl helps us with:
1. Personal time management and accountability - you will find that you are more deliberate with your time
2. Creating a more non-interrupt driven environment - you will find that you are more efficient with your time
3. Understanding where our time goes - we are now able to look at general processes and focus resources which will help us make better decisions which will allow all of us to be more effective and efficient

This is working out so well for us that we have in fact stopped using CommitCRM timers and are using toggl to do this for us as we don’t believe in "multi-tasking" and are always focused on one “project” at a time. All that said, it is not going to be our billing tracking system as CommitCRM does that well enough -- we are using it simply to track "what folks are doing" on a global scale.
Not getting too into it, we have created 15 "projects" that represent “all things work related” (you don’t want to get too many of these else it’s hard to track and takes too much time to micro-manage). These range from "client billable" to "documentation" to "travel" and even "time management". Only three of these projects are tracked as billable (billable, managed services and projects) – all the others are focused on daily tasks. Each employee simply tracks their time by toggl(ing) the timer between these items (or stopping the timer all together if they are doing personal stuff – we don’t care how much personal time they use, as long as they still work a full day). At the end of the day we have a separate (from commit) time history of what was done (via reports). The total of all these projects (“all things work related”) is entered in their time sheet for the day for accounting -- done. Employees can also review their day and cross reference what was billed in CommitCRM with what was put in the three projects (buckets) that are considered billable time in toggl.

Anyhow, with toggl, we have found a great solution to our problem with time management, tracking and accountability. I’m sure there are other ways to us it but having something outside of CommitCRM has actually been very beneficial. Maybe it will work for you as well.

cheers --

//ray

Thanks. Maybe you can suggest them that they'll use our API. It should be easy for them to let you, as a user, configure your IP address where your RangerMSP system is and then send the time entries to RangerMSP.

Just wanted to chime in (a few months late :-p) on this topic...

I agree with all previous posters that time tracking is a HUGE concern for business owners/management. Althought CommitCRM was created to facilitate BILLING and tracking BILLABLE time, being able to use CommitCRM as a one-stop-shop for billing AND for time tracking would be HUGE...it's a dream we all have.

As for my team, we have managed to accomplish this via a workaround but unfortunately too much manual work is needed to manipulate/audit. We have created separate contracts for each client that we name "nonbillable" and we have also created a contract for our own company named "admin". We have the techs enter client specific nonbillable work (i.e. "freebies") under the client's contract and non-client specific nonbillable work (meetings, training, etc.) under our Admin contract. Then things start to get ugly...when we want to run reports to extract needed information from the raw data: how much time did they spend on "admin"? how many "freebies" are we giving away? how much "training" does each tech receive each month? (NOTE: we include in "training" a newer tech taking 5 hours to accomplish a 2 hour task) Running the reports takes way too much time: manual manipulation of what is billable and what is not billable, running numerous reports, exporting to excel and copy/pasting the data into a new "frankenstein" report... *sigh*

One seemingly simple thing that would make things a LOT easier on us and hopefully could be incorporated in future CommitCRM update (please please please Commit Team :-)...) is allowing user to manually choose whether contract and or charges are billable or non-billable by default NOT just on a ticket by ticket or charge by charge basis. I understand that CommitCRM was created with "non-billable" having the definition of "not invoiceable" i.e. block of hour contracts are "non-billable" as they have already been paid for; but in reality my company (and I assume many others) define "non-billable" as "never to be billed for" in some instances. If a future update of CommitCRM allowed creation of a Global contract with a checkbox for "billable" or "non-billable" and if when creating a new labor item there was a checkbox (or field) for "billable" or "non-billable) the above described workaround that we use would be a lot more "automated".

Beyond this one improvement, it appears that what many of us are looking for is a mental shift on the part of Commit Team to grasp what we the users need: not JUST a billing solution, but a complete package for billing and time tracking. We all appreciate you, Commit Team, and the way you reply to our posts and the improvements you make with each CommitCRM update...BUT is there anything you can do to help users get what they NEED from your software? We dont want to look for other solutions, we dont want workarounds, we dont want 3rd party apps...we want YOU to be our solution :-) Is that a possibility? How do we get there?

We have been using CommitCRM for over five years now and would like to continue using it...but the limitations of the software are so frustrating, and only having workarounds and 3rd party apps as fixes is not the solution.

Sorry if this was rambling, incoherent, and or ranting...

Thank you for posting this and describing the workflow and the workarounds that you use.

Agreed. RangerMSP was designed with time billing in mind and some people do use it to track time globally.

We have received some other requests to support Contract customizations at the level where you will be able to set defaults for billable / not-billable based on the charged Item type.

As a long time customer you should know that we hear you and have probably see many items on your wish list get implemented.

Thanks for your feedback. We hear you and seriously consider your requirements.