This article describes how to use Time Tracking to compare actual labor clocked by technicians in the field to the labor estimated when your project was created.

Here you will find the Labor Types for each of the four main Labor Categories, and what values are budgeted for this project. In this example, the labor type "Install" is in the category Engineering, and the labor type "Pre-wire" is in the category Install.

You can define Labor Rates in your Company Settings.

You can define how much labor is estimated for each line item in the Add Item modal.

The dollar values listed under "Budget" are from the labor estimates that you assigned for the line items in your project. In the example below, $500 is budgeted for "Install" and $350 budgeted for "Pre-wire". For a total budget of $850.

This is because in the project example, there is a total of 10 Hours of "Install" labor (the sum of 3 line items that have Install labor) and the cost for that labor is $50/hour. Likewise there are 5 hours of "Pre-wire" and the cost for that labor is $70/hour. So, this is the Project budget before we start tracking time.

You have multiple options for how to Set up Tasks for your Install Team. The time tracked against these tasks will be used to determine the "Actual" labor values for Project Time Tracking. Click the "Set up Tasks" link to learn more.

Clocking-in represents the "Actual" hours in our Project Time Tracking example.

You can track time against a project, or non-projects categories you create.

For Project Time Tracking, select a Project. When a technician chooses to clock-in to that Project, the technician will then choose what labor type they want to clock in for, for example, "Pre-Wire". This will be the labor type the hours will be tracked against.

Use Time Tracking

Non-Project Categories

This is what the Time Tracking page looks like when a user is clocked in to a project:
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Now that we have the Budgeted Values, and a user who has clocked in against a labor type, we can compare our Budget to the Actual and look at the Balance.

In the below screenshot, you can see that the time in the first line is now, "black".

This indicates that this users' time session is no longer open, but completed.

Here also, we can see the progress against budget. In this case, $32 of the budget has been spent on "Pre-wire" labor. That leaves $318 as the Balance. This represents "Total Time Progress" of 9.1% of the budgeted Pre-wire time. The Total Time Progress is adjacent to the red arrow below.

In this example, the task the "Pre-wire" time was logged against is 'unfinished'.

Had the task been finished, the "Total Task Progress" (blue arrow) would have advanced as well. It would have advanced as 1/10 tasks completed, for example, 10%.

You can also clock in more time than is budgeted for a Labor type, making your "Balance" negative.
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You can use this Time Tracking page, to track how closely your estimated Labor is aligned with the Actual Labor time being clocked in on the Project, for each labor type. In this way, you can improve future estimates.

You can track this in real time, and you can also export this page to a CSV file.

Hope this helps! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us in Support chat!