How do I track billable time?

If your organization uses Zendesk to track billable work for clients, you can use tymeshift's time tracking to automatically record time spent on tickets, with no additional action required. This article focuses on how to configure Zendesk to support your billing flow. 

Important: we always recommend managing as much of your workflow within Zendesk as possible. tymeshift is designed to integrate with Zendesk, and thus, it tracks many things automatically.

Below are details related to the billable time that is tracked automatically.

• Agent
• Time Logged
• Date and Time
• Custom Fields
• Billable or non-billable time
• Reporting on billable time

Agent
The agent that works on the ticket is automatically recorded each time they open a ticket. 

Time Logged
Each time an agent opens a ticket, the Clock will start running and the time will be automatically logged. No additional action is required. 

Date and time
The time an agent begins working on a ticket, and the time they end their work is automatically recorded. Each time an agent opens and closes a ticket, the time is automatically recorded as a separate Timesheet. This means the level of data can be very granular. Using our Reports, you can also see a high-level overview such as Total Time spent on tickets.

Custom Fields
To optimize your workflow, we recommend capturing specific activity types or work categories that your agents work on. This can be done by using a Custom Ticket field in Zendesk. Since tymeshift automatically tracks and allows you to report on all of your custom drop-down ticket fields in Zendesk, this makes it easy (and automatic) to classify the time agents spend on a specific activity. Activity Type and Work Category are examples that you could name your drop-down fields. However, they can be named whatever makes sense for your company's workflow. 

Billable or non-billable time
There are a variety of ways you can track whether a ticket is billable or non-billable. For example, you could create a custom drop-down ticket field in Zendesk (see the section above) and include options such as billable, non-billable, and billed. If you opt to go this route, we recommend making this field required before the ticket can be solved. Alternatively, you can use another field such as Activity Type to determine whether or not a ticket is billable.

Reporting on billable time

Once you've configured your Zendesk workflow to track the data listed above, the next step is to start reporting on it in tymeshift. There are two key reports in tymeshift which are useful for reporting on billable time:

• Summary Report
  This report will give you a high-level overview of how much time your agents are spending against each organization (if you use tags for your organization in Zendesk) or how much time is spent on a particular billing status. You can organize your report to reflect that by using specific Groupings and Zendesk tags in the Parameters section.
• Custom Report
  This report will give you a very granular view showing every ticket (and even individual Timesheet) that an agent worked on.