Time

Recording what you work on, on tickets or free-form, and seeing it by day, week, project and ticket.

Time is the module for the hours, one of Alba Ticket's five with Projects, Helpdesk, Knowledge base and the CRM. Time is tracked in one place, whatever it was spent on: a helpdesk request, a project ticket, a project without a ticket, a customer without a project, or nothing at all but a description and labels. Open Time in the header to see your activities.

An activity's hours reach reports and invoices through the ticket, the project, the customer and its contract Activity what was done, start and end, tags, project, note yours, running or ended tag = key Ticket time spent, estimate project Project billed to a customer Customer contracts, phases, categories Contract and phase hourly rate and currency; a phase is a period with a budget of days Reports · Effort · Invoice hours by day, project, tag, ticket or member; cost and billable amount for those who see billing Permissions: Log time · See everyone's time · See billing · Manage billing, held on a project or on a customer. No invoice is stored: it is worked out from the phase's activities each time, so lock a billed phase.

Note

An administrator can switch time tracking off for a workspace (Modules and features). If you do not see it in yours, it is switched off there: ask an administrator if you need it.

The Time menu

Every time page carries a menu down its left edge, as a project's pages do: Activities, Reports and Effort, and for those who may see billing somewhere Customers and Phases, with Invoices for those who manage it. It starts as a rail of icons; hover over one for its name, or press the chevron at its foot to show the labels. The browser remembers the choice, for this menu and a project's alike. On a phone the rail gives way to a bar at the top of the page naming the page you are on: tap it for the same entries.

This page covers recording time and reading it back. Customers, contracts, phases and invoices are on Customers and invoicing, and the ticket page's own activities on Logging time.

Activities

The form at the top records an activity: what you did, when it started and when it ended, labels, and a project. A ticket's page has the same form, without the project, for logging time on that ticket. A few things make it quick:

  • The start defaults to the end of your last activity today (09:00 when there is none).
  • While you are in the end field, it offers times in half-hour steps up to three hours later, with the resulting length.
  • An end earlier than the start means the next day, so an evening's work that runs past midnight is one activity. An end the same as the start is refused rather than read as a whole day.
  • Completing a label switches the project to the one you last used that label with, and a notice under the form lets you undo that.
  • Leave the end empty to start an activity that is still running; Stop ends it.

A label that is a ticket's key, such as WEB-12, links the activity to that ticket: it shows on the ticket page, counts towards its time spent, and the label becomes a link. An activity's labels are your own words, not a project's labels: any text, kept in the spelling you last used, whatever case you type them in.

Activities are grouped by week and day in your browser's time zone, with totals for each. Every field of an activity is edited in place and saved when you leave it. A dot beside an activity says something is missing: red for no end, yellow for no project, blue for no labels; clicking it takes you to the field. A red time means the activity overlaps another of yours. A padlock means the activity is locked and cannot be changed until it is unlocked. History under an activity lists every change to it. Deleting an activity keeps its history.

The page shows the last six weeks; Load more fetches older activities four weeks at a time. What you and your other tabs change appears at once.

Reports

Reports under Time shows the time in a period: yours and, where you hold See everyone's time on a project or customer, everyone's. Filter by date range (this month unless you say otherwise), customer, project, member, ticket key and whether the time is billable. Or pick a phase, which sets the dates, customer and project and, where you may see billing, the rate: the totals then show the amount, and the phase's budget of days how many are used and left. The chart shows hours per day up to six weeks, per week beyond. Dates and days are in your browser's time zone.

There are five views:

  • Detailed lists every entry, editable in place when it is yours, and marks a label used with more than one project.
  • Daily combines entries with the same description and labels on a day.
  • Summary combines them across the period.
  • Labels gives hours per label.
  • Categories splits each project's hours across the customer's label categories.

Export downloads the current view as CSV, HTML or PDF (with the billing columns when you may see them), an AI-friendly Markdown or HTML digest of descriptions and notes by project and label, or a Tempo CSV for a customer's Jira Server; two buttons copy scripts that post the entries as Jira worklogs or comments from your browser's console. With a phase that has ended, Lock freezes its entries (yours, and others' where you manage billing) so they cannot be edited or deleted while invoiced; Unlock reverses it, and anyone who could lock an activity can unlock it, its author included. Every lock and unlock is written to the activity's history. When a customer with label categories is selected, labels that fall under none of its categories are listed with a picker to file each one.

Effort and cost

Note

An administrator can switch the effort and cost report off for a workspace (Modules and features). If you do not see it in yours, it is switched off there: ask an administrator if you need it.

Effort under Time answers what work really took and cost, across helpdesk requests, project tickets and free-form activities: the period's hours grouped by project, epic (a ticket whose type is an epic, with everything under it, however deep; hours under epics you may not see are counted together as Restricted epic, here and on an invoice), ticket, request type or queue for helpdesk projects, or member, with the same filters as the reports page. Each row shows the hours, the billable hours and, for tickets and epics, the estimate beside what was logged (2h under, 1h over). Whoever may see billing also sees the cost of the hours, each member's cost rate on the day, and the billable amount, the billable hours at the phase's rate or the rate of the customer's contract in force that day, so the margin of a project or a feature is visible; without that permission the money columns are not there at all. Money is shown for the customers whose billing you may see; hours of any other customer are counted but left out of the cost and amount (and of the currency the amounts are shown in), and a note under the table says how many. Export gives the table as CSV or PDF, with the same note under it.

With a customer selected and hours to bill, Invoice these hours takes the period's billable hours to the invoices page as one invoice, a line per project or per epic, or per label category for a customer that groups labels, at the contract's rate, without needing a phase; a contract worked in phases is still invoiced by its phases.

An epic's page adds up the hours logged under it, the estimates and, for those who see billing, the cost; a project's page shows the hours logged on it.