Timer - How are you using it?

[AN-Tech]

I am looking for input from other CommitCRM users to see how they are using the timer. My thought is that the timer is a nice feature but probably underutilized (at least by us) due to some of its limitations. I'm hoping you guys have a better method to track the time and details.


When working on a ticket we start the timer and type up notes related to the ticket in that window. Once we are done we click on the Charge button to create the charge item attached to the ticket.

The next step is where things could be cleaner. We don't want these notes showing up when we create our invoice in Quickbooks so we end up cutting the text off the charge then adding a history note and pasting the text into it.

Here are a few things I can think of to make things smoother. Some of these previously requested 8 years ago by myself and others.
1) Have an option to only use the top line of a charge (which is the charge description) when creating the invoice.
2) Have the notes section of timer window automatically go into a history note instead of the charge description. Maybe I am the exception but I can't that many would want these notes on the invoice being sent to a client.
3) Timer should autosave. There have been enough times that something has caused us to lose the timer and all of the notes in it while working, not fun.

[Robfnz]

Re: Timer - How are you using it?

Same, we either add our notes to one or more history notes or remove the charge notes from the invoice manually.
No. 2 would be a good solution.
No.3 is a must have, we have had the same frustrating experience. I often have multiple timers open all day, it would be good to know that should anything untoward happen the current state of all timers will be saved.

Another nice feature would be the ability (choice) to combine charges into one when creating the invoice (we use QuickBooks). At present we open the created invoice in Quickbooks and manually combine all charges for each technician into one item, removing any charge notes at the same time.
I can see why you would want to keep individual charges separate too but we tend to do a lot of invoicing based on tickets/jobs and use the resolution field for a sanitised job description for the client to read.

[alupanow]

Re: Timer - How are you using it?

Love Idea No. 1 - the option to use only the top line of a charge in Quickbooks. Each time we perform work for any customer, we put notes into the charges. Some customers only have a few charges a month and like the detailed description showing up on their invoices. For other customers with 100s of charges per month, they prefer nice reports showing the work performed, sorted by ticket or project. In those cases we have to go into Quickbooks and manually delete all the notes except the charge description from each invoice line to avoid a 200 page invoice with the same information that is already in the report. Having the option to skip the notes during billing would save us hours.

As far as using the built-in CommitCRM timer goes, we had the same problem you described. We kept losing timer information and notes when our session would get logged out. We switched to a 3rd party add-on called Interlink which keeps timers running, even when you are not logged in and does a much better job of keeping notes. Even when you time out of your login, it still submits the notes when it reconnects. This product uses the Commit API to keep things synced. Unfortunately the company that created this third party add-on has not been updating their software so it does not take advantage of some newer features of CommitCRM. I really wish that CommitCRM would buy the source code for Interlink and incorporate it into their product. It has many cool features that work better (at least for us), especially the web interface, mobile app and customer portal. In fact, we have been trying to get our customers to use the new improved customer web portal in CommitCRM but they don't even want to look at it again after using Interlink.

[Support Team]

Re: Timer - How are you using it?

Thank you for posting this. We will log your comments about timer enhancements.