No More Time and Billing Tracking?

[samuch]

I noticed in the tickets there is no spot to put time worked, time billable, etc. Will this be returning? It's rather essential for our use.

[IreneF]

Yes, at least adding some time worked is essential for us too.

Regards
Irene

[jstanden]

Hey guys,

Time tracking shouldn't be part of Cerberus Helpdesk "core" because there are also a lot of people who don't need it, and it would just become clutter for them.

That's why we built a plug-in system for 4.0, though. We'll be able to bring things like time tracking back for those of you who need it, and the people who don't need the extra functionality can keep things clean and simple.

I don't have an ETA on time tracking since it'll really depend on if any critical issues take priority. I'm sure the Support Center is expected to have precedence.

The past implementation of time tracking was pretty bad. If you guys have some suggestions on what you need it would be a big help toward making this one actually useful.

Thanks!

[simonpt]

Jeff,

I like the idea of the plug-in system. I would like to see the time tracking system include date, asignee who performed the work, minutes worked and whether or not the time is billable. The system should allow multiple asignee's to enter multiple records of time spent.

Thanks,
Paul Simon

[samuch]

Thank you for that info.

I agree with the previous poster and would say we need the person who did the work, date, time spent, and time billable.

It would also be nice to have a spot for custom values for types of service. For example, we have a general labor rate and then a separate network labor rate. So if would could specify those values and then have maybe a drop down to select the type of labor that'd be fantastic.

Also, the comments field is very handy for the tech adding in what hardware they might have used on site so we can bill it out as well as general comments to the person billing.

Thanks!

[dfluke]

I like how basecamp does time tracking for the most part. For our potential use, we would like to see billable items be tied to the companies, and for there to be an easy exportable/e-mail friendly version. It would also be nice to have a toggle for whether or not those hours worked on have been reported, billed, and reconciled.

[jstanden]

Thanks!

Added this feedback to the roadmap:
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-197

[jptechnical]

I also find this to be a must have feature for me. I could put the 4.0 in production save for this one feature.

Thanks, great script!

[jstanden]

Alright!

I bumped up the priority on a Time Tracking plugin and moved it into the current roadmap for 4.0 Release.

[waterdog]

That's great! I'm also waiting on Time Tracking and SLA plugins before I upgrade.

[davetayl]

The big thing for us is the ability to map time worked to a job/customer then report on it in a meaningful way. So for instance the problem with 3.x was that if a ticket was opened by say a hotmail address there was no way to then remap it back to the originating client for billing. Also from a reporting perspective it would be great to have a customer breakdown of tickets and the title and resolution along with time.

[jstanden]

Thanks for the feedback guys! We have this thread linked to the feature request for time tracking.

We just finished up custom fields. After UTF8/i18n/translations we can likely give time tracking the proper attention. ;)

[waterdog]

That's good news! This feature is indispensable for my business.

It would be great if you could break out subtotals by working agent, then by ticket ID, then by customer with totals for each provided for the reporting period. It would also be nice to show the actual ticket number and title rather than just the ticket ID. This would significantly reduce the amount of work and errors associated with compiling invoices.

[vedprrakash]

We need the time tracking entries too....these are some of the important things in an helpdesk environment.

Drawing a line between "core" and "plugin" is a good thing. Its just that some plugins are very essential for a helpdesk and they should be on a top most priority list. Ideally, the important plugins should not be based on "demand", it should be more based on comparison with your previous versions and what others offer....like the key functionalties of the previous system that actually added value to it.

The ones that added value should have been there by now. "Support Center" was one thing that was very much needed. Other functionalities like time "tracking plugin" should now be now important priorities.

Another important thing is that earlier watchers used to get comments too....I think its not there any more.

Regards,
Ved.

[dfroberg]

I'm currently using the custom fields to keep track, just waiting for the API docs to be published so I can write a report plugin for them :)

Hopefully the time tracker plugin etc beats me to it :)

/Danny

[jstanden]

It would be great if you could break out subtotals by working agent, then by ticket ID, then by customer with totals for each provided for the reporting period. It would also be nice to show the actual ticket number and title rather than just the ticket ID. This would significantly reduce the amount of work and errors associated with compiling invoices.

Perfect! That's exactly the kind of feedback we need to do this right.

Drawing a line between "core" and "plugin" is a good thing. Its just that some plugins are very essential for a helpdesk and they should be on a top most priority list.

Quote of the month material!

Ideally, the important plugins should not be based on "demand", it should be more based on comparison with your previous versions and what others offer....like the key functionalties of the previous system that actually added value to it.

Aww, Ved! You were on a roll before that quote! :D

That's completely backwards. What's the point of copying the competition's feature list if our community isn't asking for those features? I'd much rather focus on demand every day, first and foremost. I could care less what competitors offer if they're trapped in an endless arms race with each other serving their marketing departments instead of their customers.

Time tracking happens to have a lot of demand -- and I was just telling the guys today that I feel pretty compelled to work on it above a lot of other things currently on my list.

I assure you the community democracy is a great representation of what's really important.

The ones that added value should have been there by now.I'm not even sure how to respond to that! Which immutable law of software development was that one? Do you have a secret roadmap I haven't seen?

You clearly don't understand our objectives with 4.0. We aren't competing with our past selves. We aren't competing with the various other projects that get mentioned from time to time. It's entirely intentional that we stripped everything out and waited until people asked for it to be added back.

That's where your logic contradicts our conscious strategy.

For example, we left out 3.x's "Projects" area -- which was horrible. How many 4.0 users are asking for that back? None. They're all appropriately using "Remember The Milk" or Basecamp or something else more suited for the job.

We're just as concerned during this renovation with getting rid of things nobody needs anymore. If you don't involve the community, you won't have any idea what those things are. Remember, this project is 6 years old. 6 years is a lot of pulling on the project in a lot of directions -- and it's not realistic to assume every change was on this linear projection to "better". Some changes were better. Many, many, many changes made things worse. In software, it's much easier to add than it is to remove. (Hint: that's not a good thing)

If we simply copied our past feature list, we'd be inheriting all our past baggage without bothering to stop and ask if we still needed it. Do you really think a little survey of "Check the boxes for the features you don't care about anymore" would work? Of course not.

It's a bit painful for people to have to constantly say "Without 'Feature X' I'm not going to upgrade." -- but it's a necessary phase of project catharsis.

I think people just get a bit emotionally wrapped up in what "4.0" means, as if everything will always be a major jump forward without any reflection. What we're upgrading is the entire approach, not the bits and bytes of 3.x.

And who's to say it's crazy because other projects aren't doing it? They aren't doing a lot of things -- that's why you're here, right? :D

Another important thing is that earlier watchers used to get comments too....I think its not there any more.Take a look at 02-Jan-2008's Subversion commit log -- that's less than one day's work. Feature implementation is the absolute simplest part of this project.

If we didn't have the checks and balances of democracy in place, there's barely a feature request that would take longer than a couple hours to implement. Don't get wrapped up in what's missing -- it's CHEAP and TRIVIAL to reimplement. What's not cheap, or trivial, is our dialogue here to determine what's worth bringing back. Less is more, and all that.

(These discussions are great! I might respond passionately, but this will never be an argument.)

[vedprrakash]

Quote of the month material!

I hope the there is a reward for that :D

I am not trapped in the past...as I really like this new feature.....to an extent where we are paying a prgrammer to come up with a seperate interafce for our internal techs. We took beating from our clients for the down time that we had and other complaints about missed features and so on...this shows we still want to stay with this new version as we feel that this is good thing......and I still get calls where I need to tell them how great the system is...

I contiunue to work on Kayako for one client, Cerb 3.x for another and we had installed cerb 2.x internally....Not following the herd is a good thing and I appreciate that you and your team in community oriented.

There are few things in competitors system that even our community wants and I belive you are and we all are working on that. Time tracking tool is a good example...another one can be reporting....Cerb 2.x was way too cluttered but we stayed with it for three years because of some core functionalities...

Its good to have such discussions as it opens up minds in the community and developers. This helps us look forward...

I can certainely list some programs that did add value and not only for me...but for some others who moved to cerberus on our recommendations...

Also, I will be adidng how we are trying to create the agent interface in the concerned thread...

Regards,
Ved.

[karlovac]

Time tracking is critical to us too. We use it as follows:

- Track who did work, and when. And a brief description of the work.
- To track actual time worked. Multiple entries per ticket are handy.
- To track billable time.

Reporting was something that I think was insufficient in Cerberus 2.7. We wrote our own reporting pages that extracted the information. This was *extremely* fiddly. We needed to keep track of time spent on a per-ticket/customer basis (so we could see how much each ticket was costing us). A "customer" for us is a company, not an individual.

Also the zero/blank time entry handling in the old version is a major pain. To me, if I leave a number field blank, I mean 0 or null. Moreover, if I type 0, I mean 0.

In short, the old time tracking was very useful, as it stood. More configurable searching/reporting options would be very handy.

[jstanden]

Quote of the month material!
I hope the there is a reward for that

haha! Just my eternal respect. ;)

There are few things [...] Time tracking tool is a good example...another one can be reporting....Cerb 2.x was way too cluttered but we stayed with it for three years because of some core functionalities...

I absolutely agree that 2.x/3.x were way too cluttered. For now I agree that 4.0 is conversely too simple.

The difference is the first 9 months of energy in 4.0 development has been spent building a platform based on 6 years of learning from our mistakes.

The pace of 4.0 development lately isn't a coincidence -- this process is exponential. It takes months to build a good framework so you write features (for many years going forward) in hours and minutes.

Its good to have such discussions as it opens up minds in the community and developers. This helps us look forward...

Absolutely! I'd really like to communicate that these minor tweaks 4.0 needs are incredibly simple. I already spent the past 9 months in a death-march getting the new platform (Devblocks) together. That's now an asset we can carry forward for years. That makes every piece of feedback easier to evaluate and implement.

It's an entirely different chronology than we had going in 2.x/3.x when change was expensive -- not only complex, but the tightly-coupled code changes would frequently break unrelated things. It's incredibly liberating to put those days behind us.

Also, I will be adidng how we are trying to create the agent interface in the concerned thread...

Jeremy (former WGM coder who's at Yahoo! now) and I are going to work on the Cerb4 RESTful web API this weekend. That will likely be a big help for developing your alternate interface and tools.

You're definitely better off going with the web API than expecting the database schema (and, to some degree, the internal API) will never change.

[jptechnical]

I see that 4.0 is the current version now, has this issue thread been resolved? I would like to know before I start converting.

Thanks.

[ddcSupport]

Jeff - You are doing an impressive job of staying focused and positive in the face of seemingly incessant feature requests. It is to your credit that even the most inane request for a gizmo is responded to with gentle, nurturing guidance towards the plug-in model...

So, I'm not a coder, and I'm not likely to study the API. I would, however, gladly consider a small bounty for "plug-ins" that deliver the necessary functionality. How much and how long (and who are the candidates) for the following:

1. Time tracking - hours or minutes worked associated at the response level w/ relational capacities (company, worker, thread/ticket total) functional. There were 2 systems in 2.7. Time Worked in minutes in responses and hours in the Time Tracking entries. The total was displayed in the Ticket Status screen and that could be use to create a Time Tracking entry prior to closing the ticket.

2. Mail functions - we quarantine some email for a particular regulatory oversight application with Cerberus - I would like to have the "Bounce" feature back, and add a "Deliver" wherein the email that was intercepted could then continue on it's path. We're forwarding to aliases now, and that is cumbersome and messes with the header.

4.0 is really very nice (Version 4.0 RC1 (Build 515)), and I look forward to our cutover. We need the Time Tracking to make the switch. Thanks. Robert

[bcavish]

Hey Robert,

Jeff will probably update you guys on our direction with this, but we are currently thinking we may be able to do something like you guys are requesting for time tracking with a task system we are creating as a plugin.

*small teaser* Our task system will allow you to assign specific tasks, organizations, tickets, forum threads, or jobs to other team members in a quick hot keyed fashion. We think this will allow for us to also track time as well (and pull up easy reports).

We will get you guys more information as this progresses

[ddcSupport]

Thanks for the update. How about the e-mail extensions. It seems like some of the code already in the watcher functionality might make these fairly easy to do. Robert

[Hildy]

What determines whether or not an email gets quarantined? Is it something that can be expressed as a rule and used to route incoming email to a specific Group Inbox or Bucket? If so, then "Deliver" would just be a matter or moving it to the correct Inbox/Bucket.

Bounce is another animal entirely that we'd have to look at, because there's no corresponding functionality in Cerberus right now.

[ddcSupport]

Quarantine decision is made off-system and forwards to an address (I'm looking at writing those messages to your input directory). Sometimes, though I want to send the message back off-system to another (or the original) destination, but not forward; more like re-queue. There's a function for this in 2.7. Imagine Cerberus sitting in the middle of a SMTP engine stopping and reviewing all mail before it can go (or even if it can go) anywhere.

Robert

[samuch]

It's great news to hear that this has been put on the roadmap. I might just be bad at finding it but I didn't see a timeline. Is there an estimated release timeframe or a way to track development of this time tracking plugin?

Just curious to see about when I should reserve some time to migrate once this is up.

Thanks again for listening to our requests! :)

[bcavish]

I won't be able to provide you with any specific time frames for the development of this, but you can track progress at wgmdev.com or on this forum thread really :)

The relevant time tracking development entry I found is here:
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-197

[davetayl]

Awesome, it's the only thing holding us up from taking up 4.x

[bartmann]

Ditto, we can only tinker with 4 since the other guys will starting moving into production (all tech guys). I cannot even let them beta it without time tracking since I have to bill for their time.

[Hildy]

davetayl and bartmann, you might want to head over to the Community Voting Booth and make your desires known here: http://www.cerb4.com/forums/showthread.php?t=638

Jeff's currently running a poll on what feature should be next on the dev list.

[joeberg]

I just voted also. This is my biggest needed feature as well. I actively bill out of helpdesk. I have done a test migration so that I can get familiar with it and how it will fit in my organization and am very much looking forward to moving to v4, but like others, I cannot migrate until there is some time tracking capability in place because I run invoices out of it. I thought about doing it myself using custom fields, but if there there will be an official plugin, I will wait. Below I will list some features that would be nice to have in the plugin and some that I had created for Cerb3 that others might find useful. I am not saying this have to be done as I can implement them myself if they aren't done in the plugin and they may be more than most people need. I just want to show what was useful to us in the hope that it might help others.

1. A daily timesheet summary. - In Cerb3, I created custom time entry screens that would let my employees go back and list any activity they have been involved in during the day (by querying for email activity) and list any time that had been entered in association with each ticket. They could click on a problem or correspondence in the daily activity list and using AJAX it would pull up detail on each email transaction for easy reference in a popup. They could also enter misc time that wasn't associated with a specific ticket for that day that would show up on that screen. It would show a total of how many hours they had worked that day also. This was in addition to the ticket time entry screen on the ticket while they were working on it. Time entered in the ticket would show on the daily summary screen (i.e. they could enter it either place). While viewing the time entry screen, the user could click a checkbox to view all activity for the day (rather than just theirs) in the event they needed to enter time for a problem in which they didn't show correspondence. The tech could also jump forward and backward a day with one click as well as go directly to any specified day.

2. The ability to enter time with a short summary that was associated with a customer, but not a particular ticket. We implemented this in Cerb3 by associating one generic ticket with each customer and entering updates to this ticket for misc entries. I realize that some may not want time entered if it isn't associated with a ticket, but this worked well for us in some situations. This was done in the timesheet summary screen mentioned in #1 by selecting a customer from a select list, entering a description and a time entry that would be stamped with the date currently being viewed.

3. In Cerb3, I also created a dashboard that would show the time the employee had billed for the day, week, and month. This was indicated with a bar graph like the queue loading graphs.

4. A report that would show time billed by employee by day, week, and month. I realize this is a separate plugin, but would be great to have.

Again, these are just features I find useful. I can reimplement them myself for my situation if necessary, but need a basic time tracking infrastructure to do so (or use custom fields).

thanks,

Joey Smith
iTech Atlanta, LLC
http://www.itechatlanta.com

[Hildy]

Thanks, Joey. I added your comments to the JIRA issue as well: http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-197

[jlehrhoff]

time tracking would be good. Even some e-commerc interface or link for the actual billing would be nice as well...

[samuch]

I noticed Jeff is working on this but didn't see if it was in the latest release. I can easily miss things.

Is there perhaps an ETA? I know the CHD-197 says due next is milestone #20 but I'm not sure what that translates to time wise.

Thanks!

[joegeck]

Sorry to say that there is still no set release date, but rest assured this is on the horizon. In fact you may have seen some of the early working of time tracking if you've been syncing with the dev branch in SVN. We are working on it as part of the next upcoming release (#20) so it should indeed be one of the next "major" features to be implemented.

NOTE: This is not an endorsement to download the latest time tracking code in the dev branch. It is not finished right now and you will only be disappointed if you try and use it for your everyday needs.

[sam_ct]

Ok, so I see that JIRA now shows a resolution status of fixed.

When do you plan on releasing the updated version?

(From the website I can see that the latest stable build is v. 4.0 Build 736 (Stable))

[Hildy]

We're finalizing some of the translations stuff before we release stable, but if you don't care about that you can just grab the dev trunk instead (rev 781 as of this morning). ( http://svn.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4/cerb4 instead of http://svn.webgroupmedia.com/cerb4/branches/stable )