How do I record time against clients and services?

First: this is optional

Every business starts with a client representing itself and a system service called „General“. Time tracking is therefore usable without any master data upkeep.

Clients, projects, services and allowances are an add-on. No business has to set them up in order to record working time. Anyone who only documents arrivals and departures leaves the defaults in place and stops reading here.

Clients

A client is a master record with a name, address and contact details. The detail page has tabs for projects, allowances and departments, which load their data separately.

A client can be tied to one or more departments. That controls who sees them in the selection at all and may book against them.

• Clients are set to inactive rather than deleted, so that recorded times and reports remain.
• Deactivating closes no projects and no allowances. Both continue; only the client is no longer selectable.
• Several clients can be deleted in one operation, and clients can be imported from a file.

Services

The service catalogue lists what can be booked against: name, description and billing attributes. For initial setup there is a supplied template catalogue from which several services can be created at once, instead of typing each one by hand.

Like clients, services can be tied to departments. Only assigned services appear for their members when recording time.

If a service is missing when booking, it can be created from the entry dialogue and assigned to the client, provided the person may manage services.

The assignment: first assigned, then bookable

A service is assigned to a client, with terms of its own. Only then is it bookable against that client. One of the assigned services can be marked as the default for new bookings.

The billing flag and the hourly rate per booking derive from that assignment. They are the basis of the revenue report.

The assignment carries terms, not quantities. A quantity limit is the allowance, and that is independent of it.

Allowances

An allowance sets how many hours of a service are available to a client in a period. Bookings draw it down, and the remaining balance is visible when booking.

The most important point for expectations: an exhausted allowance does not block the booking. The remaining balance is shown and may be used up, and time tracking carries on. An overrun is therefore visible, but not prevented.

Report

The times can be reported per client, drilling down to individual bookings. Alongside it sits the service breakdown: how the recorded time spreads across the services.

Clients, services, the assignment and the allowances are available to the app as reference data, so that it does not have to reload every time something is booked.

Service records

From a client's recorded times a service record is created with a sequential number, collecting the items to be signed.

Signing happens on the device, first internally and then by the client. The name, role, version of the consent, the time on the device and the device characteristics are recorded.

If nobody is available at the client, the record can be completed without their signature. That remains identifiable as a separate operation and is not recorded as a regular signature.

• A record waits for the internal signature, then for the client's, and is then completed, withdrawn or expires.
• If it is still waiting for a signature after fourteen days, it lapses.
• Every operation on the record is kept as a chained event. A dedicated verification route reports whether the chain is intact.
• The completed record is generated as a PDF.