Handling of travel time in timed

trowik commented 7 months ago

current situation

Timed in its current version handles travel time identically to any other task in a project. Billable positions are cumulated into the project's engineering hours. Contractually we handle travel time differently. Travel time is out of those rates and billed on a fixed rate of amount_in_chf per hour (chf/h): For projects where we are not allowed to charge travel time, we book travel time as non Billable.

As a PL, I have to provide overviews that contain following informations:

Project Invoice
      Billable travel time: XXX hours
      Not billable travel time: XXX hours

Timed behaviour

Creating a report sums up travel time as any other position in the project:

Ideally I'm able to take the numbers from the work report and map them 1:1 to the invoicing information. I would like to see table like the following example:

                         Billable non-Billable
Administration            4:00     1:15
Consulting and planning   2:15     1:15
Technical work           25:30     2:00
-------------------------------------------------
Project time             36:30     4:30

Travel time               4:45     0:00

Total time               41:00     4:30

The same issue exists in the budget check. All positions are summed up, even travel time is not part of the project engineering budget:

Over all the current implementation works well for projects exclusively performed remote. For all projects involving travel time, the budget overview is useless and I have to manage it separately in a spreadsheet. I'm unable to use the work report to initiate monthly billing, myself and administration always needs to do cumbersome and error prone copy&paste.

Pretty often customers are aware travel time is something separate and I have to rework (or build from scratch) a customer facing work report. Over all this costs me currently 6-8 hours a month.

proposal

1) Summarize travel time separately on the work report

Should be straight forward since most of the logic is defined in some kind of ODS Template 2) Don't add travel time to the Spent fields in the budget overview
Involves some magic in the code

I'm not sure if matching the string Travel Time is the perfect approach. It's probably the simplest approach, but we have historically german values in the task descriptions, furthermore we sometimes adjust the description to make controlling more clear. As an example Customer_ABC / Project_QWE / E-Travel Time. It might be ideal to add an attribute to the task, marking it as is_travel_time

trowik commented 7 months ago

Melkor333 commented 2 weeks ago

Since we do have separate travel_time entries for each project now this should be very trivial to fix with a flag "bill [field] separately" to put it separately in the work report & not include it in the used budget. 🤔

adfinis / timed