Change default categories per service (or mark time as billable?)

[Alex8000]

Good Morning all,

We are running into an issue regarding marking time logged against tickets as billable or not billable. Would it be possible to change the default categories under which a certain action is logged based on the service a request has been logged against, or add an easy way to mark this time as billable?

Some of our services are time billable by default, and some are not. Right now we are using a default subcategory called 'Ticket Update' for all time logged against a request. This does not distinguish between billable and not billable time.
Because of this we created a second subcategory called 'Ticket Update Billable' for all billable time. Whenever our agents are logging time against a ticket logged against a service whose time is billable our agents would have to constantly change to the second subcategory. This small extra step is easy to forget and when forgotten will cost the organisation money.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Alex

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your post.  We are having some internal discussions about different approaches for this.  I'm interested to know if you use the billable feature on the tasks or if you are simply looking to utilize the Timesheet App categories for separating all chargeable items. Do you add entries to Timesheet Manager that are chargeable, but not related to a Service Manager request either by directly adding it into the Timesheet app or via an email or task?

Regards,

James

[Alex8000]

Good Morning James,

Thank you for discussing this with your colleagues.

Before switching to the Timesheet Manager for logging billable hours we did indeed use tasks to log all (not only billable) actions on a request. The BPM automatically generated a 'time logging' task for every request in which our analysts would say how long they spent on it and that time is billable or not. However, this way of doing things led to confusion and irritation among them because they tend to solve eachothers requests and would then not be able to log time on the task (which was assigned to someone else). Assigning the task to the entire team would completely drown out the task list for every one of them and render it useless.

The Timesheet Manager allows us to not only have every analyst log time at the same time independent of request owner, but also allows us to log many types of time. Our analysts would have categories 'Request', 'Communication customer', 'communication supplier', and 'other'. Ideally they would be able to mark each of these types as billable or not. We are currently experimenting with just adding more categories named 'Request Billable' etc..

We will also be using Timesheet Manager for logging other types of work which may or may not be directly related to a request. Think of things like on site technical installations, on site troubleshooting, preparing for projects, etc. Some of these can also be billable tasks.

I hope this explains our envisioned use cases for Timesheet Manager. It's hard to formulate an all encompassing forum post without writing multiple chapters on it ;-) 
Let me know if you require more information!

Thanks,

Alex

[Alex8000]

Hi @James Ainsworth, 

I was wondering if my post helped you. 

In a nutshell: In our servicedesk analysts regularly close each other's requests. They have to be able to then also log time against the request. This is not possible with tasks as only the task owner can close a task. Assigning tasks to the entire team is not an option due to completely drowning out the tasks list for everyone.

Hope this helps,

Alex

[Martyn Houghton]

@Alex8000, @James Ainsworth

We too want to record the time against both BPM activities generated from requests and eventually manually created activities. In respect of the latter we want to default these categories at a service level, perhaps a bit like the profile categories in SM where you are limited to a certain part of the tree at a service level, as well as setting individual defaults at the BPM individual manual activity.

As Alex points out an issue with the activities at the moment is the ability for other team members to re-assign to themselves or complete activities on the owner behalf. Which is been raised in the post below.

Cheers

Martyn

 

[James Ainsworth]

@Alex8000 thanks for your post.  This does help clarify how you are using the Time Spent.  As @Martyn Houghton has pointed out, there is an ongoing discussion and an investigating to look at the ability to re-assign a task that is associated to a request when you are not the owner or the assignee, but you are a member of the team that the request is assigned to.  

Do you feel that this would provide what you are looking for?

Regards,

James

 

[Alex8000]

Hi @James Ainsworth,

This would definitely be a step in the right direction regarding the reassignment of requests! Thank you for taking a look at this.

We think there might be an underlying issue being that it would be logical to assign tasks related to a request to a 'request owner' variable, which would automatically have the task owner change depending on who owns the request. What's your opinion on this?

Best regards,

Alex