Moving from Elastic Time
Bringing an Elastic Time account across whole: people, clients, contracts, phases, label categories, team members, activities and invoice details.
Elastic Time, NordStack's time tracker, exports an account as one JSON file that holds everything it kept. Alba Ticket reads that file into the workspace: the account's owner and everyone it names become members or placeholders; each client becomes a customer with its billing details, contracts, label categories, projects and team members; the phases come across with their rates and budgets; every activity becomes a time entry of its person, with its lock and, where it was deleted, its deletion; and the owner's invoice details become the workspace's when it has none. Nothing is dropped, and the file can be imported again.
An activity's per-year CSV export, and any other tracker's file, go through the time entries import instead; this page is for the whole account.
What you need
- The JSON export from Elastic Time: under Preferences, Export everything (JSON). It downloads as
elastictime-<email>-<date>.json. - The people the file names as members of the workspace, by email address, where you want their entries to be theirs from the start. Anyone else is made as a placeholder, with their entries, and can be invited later; or tick Make the people it creates active members to make them members at once.
- For the activities labelled with ticket keys to link to tickets, the tickets: import from Jira first, then from Elastic Time, and an activity labelled
WEB-12lands on WEB-12 and counts towards its time spent.
The import is under Administration, Imports, Elastic Time. The file is uploaded from the page; it is kept in the workspace's storage for a day, so the import can be run again from the same analysis, and the workspace needs a storage location.
Step 1: read the export
Upload the file. It is read once, and the page shows whose account it is, what it holds (clients, projects, contracts, phases, activities, team members), which people are already members and which will be made, which tickets the activities' labels will link, and what was deleted in Elastic Time. Nothing is imported yet.
Step 2: import
Tick Dry run to see the counts without writing anything, then Import. The run's report lists what each stage created, matched or left unchanged, and review items for anything it could not do.
| In Elastic Time | In Alba Ticket |
|---|---|
| The account's owner | A member matched by email, or a placeholder. Given the Account manager role on each of their clients, so what they saw there they see here. |
| Team members | Members or placeholders, given the Consultant role on the client: they see and log time on all of its projects, as in Elastic Time. Someone invited by email who never joined is noted, and nothing is made. |
| Colleagues | Nothing: an invitation between accounts, the ones the owner sent and the ones they accepted. Each is kept, with nothing made of it, and noted. |
| Clients | Customers, by name. A customer of the same name already here is reused and gets what it lacked (billing email and address, ticket URL prefix, the default invoice label); nothing it has is overwritten. A deleted client is made nothing, and its record is kept. |
| Projects | Projects billed to the customer, of kind business, with a key made from the name (WEBS, WEBS2…) and the owner as lead. A deleted project is made archived. |
| Contracts, tag categories | The customer's contracts and label categories, deletions kept. |
| Phases | Phases under their contract and project, or neither for a personal period, with the rate override, the days available and the hours per day. |
| Activities | Time entries: description, start and end (none for one still running), labels (Elastic Time's tags) as typed, the note, the project and so the customer, billable when on a project, the lock with who locked it and when, Elastic Time's own timestamps, and the deletion for one deleted there. A tag that is a ticket's key links the ticket. |
| Invoice details | The workspace's invoice settings, when it has none. |
Every row is kept with its Elastic Time id and its original record, so running the same file again changes nothing, and running a newer export brings across what changed. An activity that was already imported from a CSV export of the same account, or typed here by hand, is recognised by its person, start and description and not made twice.
After the import
Open Time, Customers to see the customers with their contracts and categories, Time, Phases for the phases, and Time, Activities as the owner to see the entries. The report's review items say what was skipped and why.