Work Records

The concept of Work Records enables you to keep track of who devoted how much time to an individual activity. Powerful reporting features enable you to not only aggregate such information at various levels, you can also analyze actual effort information and compare it to effort estimates (see Figure 7-3, for example). Furthermore, Work Records can serve as a basis for billing and controlling:

Figure 4-8. Work Record

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Anatomy of a Work Record:

Name of the Work Record
use Description for a short summary (approximately 60 or fewer characters) of the Work Record
the fields Started at and Ended at contain date/time information, reflecting when work on an activity started and when it stopped; depending on your billing system you may have to submit at least one Work Record for each day worked on an activity (it is possible to submit multiple Work Records for the same activity)
hh (pause duration) and mm (pause duration) reflect the total duration in hours and minutes you did not work on the activity at hand between Started at and Ended at (i.e. duration should reflect the cumulative pause if there were multiple interruptions). Example: if you worked from 8am to 5pm on an activity and took breaks from 9.30am to 10am and from 2pm to 2.15pm and had lunch from 11.30am to 12.15pm the cumulative pause amounts to 1 hour and 30 minutes, i.e. hh=1 mm=30)
hh (duration) and mm (duration) are calculated by openCRX and reflect the total duration in hours and minutes you did actually work on the activity at hand based on the information contained in Started at, Ended at , hh (pause duration) and mm (pause duration). Example: if you worked from 8am to 5pm on an activity and took breaks from 9.30am to 10am and from 2pm to 2.15pm and had lunch from 11.30am to 12.15pm the net working time amounts to 7 hours and 30 minutes, i.e. hh=7 mm=30)
Contact is a reference to the openCRX contact who spent time on the activity (i.e. the worker) - by default this reference is set to the logged in user upon creation of a new Work Record, i.e. usually you will not have to set this reference manually
check Billable to indicate that the billing system should process this Work Record
Hourly rate contains the hourly rate applicable to this Work Record
select the appropriate Currency applicable to the Hourly rate and the Amount
Amount is calculated by openCRX based on the net working time (hh duration and mm duration) and the Hourly rate
Invoice can contain a reference to an invoice (adding these types of references is typically done by the billing system once a Work Record is processed)