Time Tracking on Jobs
Hours logged against a job drive its labour cost, and the invoice on a time-and-materials job. You can clock on and off as you work, or type entries in afterwards.
Applies to: every plan. Seeing the Time Tracking card needs erp:operations:jobs:view. Adding, editing and removing entries needs erp:operations:jobs:edit. Seeing what the hours are worth, on the Job Summary card, needs erp:operations:jobs:financials or erp:finance:ar:view.
Prerequisites: The Job Detail Page. Set each person's cost rate first, in Setting Up Employees.
Where time lives
Open a job and scroll to the Time Tracking card, under the eyebrow Labour. It lists every entry — Date, Employee, Start, End and Hours — and totals the hours at the foot. With nothing logged it reads No time entries recorded.
Clock on and off
The blue action button in the job header is the fastest route. It offers Clock In once the job is In Progress, and Clock Out while your own entry is running.
- Start the job if it has not started. The header button reads Start Job.
- Select Clock In. An entry opens at the current time, marked billable.
- Select Clock Out when you stop. The entry closes and its hours are worked out for you.
A running entry shows a dash in the End column, and its hours climb as you watch. You can also close someone else's running entry from that row's Actions menu, with Clock Out.
Clock in and out is per job, not per task. Tasks on a job are a checklist and carry no hours.
Where the time was recorded
In the mobile app, clocking on and off records where the phone was, if the person has already allowed the app to use their location. So do starting, pausing, resuming and completing a job. The app never asks for it just to clock on. On the Time Tracking card, a pin beside the start or end time opens that point on a map. An entry with no pin was typed in, or recorded without location.
With no signal
The app records clocking on and off even with no signal. The entry keeps the time the button was pressed, and it reaches the job when the phone reconnects, up to a week later.
You can only be clocked in to one job at a time. Try a second and AxiomBlue names the job you are already on and asks you to clock out of it first.
Enter time by hand
- Select Add Entry on the Time Tracking card.
- Date — required.
- Start Time and End Time — both required. The hours come from the gap between them.
- Employee — optional. Leave it empty and the entry belongs to you.
- Description — optional. What the work was.
- Break (minutes) — optional. Taken off the hours worked and billed. It must be shorter than the time between start and end.
- Billable — leave ticked to charge the time, clear it to record the hours without charging them, such as a warranty return. Unbilled hours still count on timesheets and in the job's cost.
- Select Add Entry.
Selecting an existing row reopens it as Edit Time Entry, saved with Save Changes. The row's Actions menu also offers Edit Entry and Remove. In the table, an entry with a break shows it under the hours, and time that isn't charged reads Not billable.
In the mobile app, Add Entry opens Add Time Entry. Set the start and end on the clock. Then set the break, in five-minute steps, and the Billable switch, and select Save Entry.
Estimated against actual
Set Estimated Duration on the Job Details card and a bar appears under the entries, comparing time On site with Estimated. Time on site is how long the job took: the hours when at least one person was clocked on. When more than one person worked, their person-hours show beside it: every entry added together, which is what labour is billed on. Two people working one hour is one hour on site, not an overrun. It reports the hours remaining, warns Only 1.5h left of the estimate as you close in, and turns to Over estimate by 2.0h once you pass it.
Without an estimate there is no bar. An empty Estimated Duration means nobody has estimated the job, not that it takes no time.
What the hours do
- Job costing — each entry keeps the employee's cost rate, or their hourly rate if no cost rate is set, from when it was recorded, and hours times rate is the job's labour cost. All time counts, billable or not. The Job Summary card shows it under Cost and margin, with materials at cost and the margin against the charge. It also says how much time is from people with neither a cost nor hourly rate. How job cost and margin are worked out explains each figure.
- Invoicing — on a time-and-materials job, billable entries become the labour on the invoice.
- The Job Summary card — lists each billable entry with its duration, rate and amount, then rolls labour, materials, GST and the total together. Non-billable entries are counted there but never charged.
- Estimate accuracy — actual against estimated tells you whether the job is running to plan.
An entry takes the cost rate that applied when it was created. Changing an employee's rate later leaves their existing entries alone, so fix the rate before a big run of work rather than after.
Time on a submitted timesheet is locked
Job time also fills each person's weekly timesheet. Once that timesheet is submitted or approved, the time on it can't be edited or removed here, and no new entry can be typed onto a day it covers. AxiomBlue names the timesheet and says whether it needs recalling or reopening first. Clocking on still works. See How timesheets work.
What you should see
Every closed entry shows its hours, and the card's Total matches the sum. Check the hours before you generate an invoice from a time-and-materials job, because that total is what the customer is charged for.