Custom field options in Timelog and other Timelog needed features

12-03-2018: update vs the new timelog

The goal is to minimize clicks on the timelogs and or to process, approve or modify the time

To have all information required for billing and time registration under one page. therefor i think we need custom fields for the timelog, that timelog entries are different then comments on tasks as that is used for planning, resource planning, project / task estimates. This should NOT be polluted with the actual worked time and or billable time. this is the timesheet for the employee, and reference for the billing department

Now with categories we can tag time in its place, like billable, billable tbd or internal time, sick, leave etc.

In the view you have the very much valued wrike feature to calculate all from an overview with filters.. 

this is very powerful as the employee, manager and finance has all this information realtime

BUT to make this work truly, we need the acceptance that we need to maintain more info on a timelog / billable item

Custom fields is the most powerfull wat to do this.

For instance i can add an actual billable line field or an invoice reference field, to know that some items are processed. it would also open up automation with the api for this

Or for employees they know howmuch holiday is still available or as manager he can match the actual holiday/leave vs the planned / requested.

But for us the most imported one is to use then the comment as the justification for the timelog. to lookup it in another view , searching in the task comments is just too time consuming. 

as now with the new timelog vs the old we miss a few things:

- unable to double click on the time to get the fractional time, the custom field fractional time would help solve this (and yes i know i can export the timelog. but i need this realtime to modify and to fast copy and paste)

- unable to select or double click to copy the task name value, normally its only click or select, now its already an extra windows, slow load times , time consuming.

- multiple lines in a commen field. in the past we could add multiple lines with an enter. now not. i can live with if we had custom fields , but if not then we need to add multiple lines in the comment of the timelog a long comment is not an option or to add it to the task comment, as this pollutes and is too time consuming. 

- realtime update when you split up the time, now we have billable time , or 50/50 and To be determined billable time. i guess everyone has this. so then you need to split up the time on a task. in a timelog with category billable and one non billable. you need to refresh the interface . takes time, could be faster, makes wrike snappy and fast too work with.

As you see my focus and i guess most clients focus is to work fast and efficient in wrike. this is what makes wrike, wrike, now things change and we spent a lot of time in the timelog if we have 5 to 10 timelogs on a day then you can imagine for a month for X employees, then the mentioned issues would make wrike super fast and flexible for the timelog and also enables wrike to be used as a real time sheet thats is tightly integrated with you task , project work planning and day.

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initial request with the old timelog in mind

Hello all,

We bill hours to the customers, but the workflow for this is a bit lacking in wrike.

I love the way how we can track the time and generate tasks and timelog entries on these tasks in wrike, but there is stops unfortunately

We miss a few tools in the timelog overview. The use of custom fields in the timelog overview could enable wrike customers to add an input field of checkbox or dropdown on a time-entry and here it could help to draft a process. this is for us then the bare minimum.

Let me mention in short the process we have.

When an engineer does work for a customer on one or more tasks, then it can be he or she has a fragmented timelog, this means many registrations on one day for one task. so here we need to combine manually. (would be nice to have a function for this)

Second after each day or  in the beginning of the next an employee summarizes his or her timelog entries, modifies the timen entry first line to a billable description line with a date and textual code "c,01-01-2016: we did this and this (wrikeid#)" and then declares this timelog as "to be approved" 

here you can imagine it would nice to have each timelog entry to have the ability to have its own status in wrike so you could work with it. setting into a custom workflow that can be worked with.

In terms of auditing we miss on the timelog screens, that there is no auditing, so someone could adjust the entry without any additions of log to the task.  (like adjusted from X hours to X or changed description from X from Y .. by person Z

Additional when a timelog entry would be in a certain status then it should not be able to be adjusted by an employee.

A little bug: in the timelog entry screen you cannot input normal time like 10M or 1H you can only add 0.xx while this really time consuming when you need to adjust and recalculate it to fractional time, not really user friendly

in short the timelog function is lacking a bit. and for us the ideal situation would be more separate status/ workflow integration on each timelog separately .. but a basic customfield would already help a lot.

in the end we need a way to have employee's add time, this needs to be approved and audited.

Thanks

Jan