Time Cards and time worked field.. what How why?

[sLuintel]

Hello all

We are currently thinking of using the time worked field on incidents. I have been playing around and noticed it relates to time cards, I therefore thought hey time cards could be useful for our project managers who are constantly complaining about them having to chase up on each project etc and they will likely come aboard on service now at some stage, well I hope they do. Anyway I am trying to get my head around how the time card and the time worked fields are related and how they work. I have looked at the wiki, and I feel that's just basic information like creating a time card and updating fields etc. I am more interested in all the functional relations behind the scenes, what update leads to what other things being auto updated. what is the main functionality of the time cards, I know with service now we can pretty much make it work to our own needs but its nice to understand more of why it exists and what and how else its used. Any documents, reading materials or information would be great thanks.

[Uncle Rob]

So basically any update to Time Worked creates a Time Card.   Most of the time this happens by default because the Time Worked field is set to auto-increment once the form loads.

For me I've never felt those seconds/minutes logging was where the real value was at.   I've always appreciated time cards for one's ability to edit them (with some ACL modification).   For example, I always spent my hour long commutes communicating over email via customers.   Since I was using email, none of the time was being tracked natively in SN.   I was still working tickets though.   I'd come in the next day and log 1 hour time chunks against tickets I worked.

"But you didn't have the form open!"
"Who cares!"

I'd argue the bulk of the work we do is not in front of the forms we have to fill out.

[Mike Allen]

In another life, we used the time worked field to bill customers.   You can edit the time worked record when you are putting in all the notes from any work you are doing outside the record.   You can also update the time worked record and the time card, as well.

We used this all across SN, through incident, problem, project, even SDLC so we developers could track our time, as well.

[sLuintel]

Thanks for the replies, I am only looking at these now. Our service desk is an external supplier and service now is integrated into their system, they are the ones keen on using the time worked field, I guess they have had some issue on their side about calls taking ages to complete or something else. I also noticed that once a task is closed, the time worked still runs unless you manually go and stop it. Is that what you mean by having ACL modifications. I don't know if it was me as an admin being able to stop and start it or if that happened to any other resolver groups.

[Uncle Rob]

Time worked doesn't care about state.   Its just a ticket that starts moving when you open a form.   That ticket doesn't *do* anything unless you update the ticket.   I'd argue if you're updating post-closure that you're still doing work and it should be logged.   I also argue that you can add time worked post closure manually via the related list.

What I mean by ACL modifications, is that you need to grant permissions for normal licensed users to both see, create, and modify time card records directly.   OOB you need some elevated privilege for this.

[sLuintel]

Ok, so just to clarify, for example;

Scene A: if there is Ticket A, I open it , the time worked starts running (the time increases) I just leave it open for 30 mins and go about doing something else and then click update on that ticket it will show on time worked:   I worked for 30 minutes on that ticket?

Scene B: I open Ticket A, leave it open for 30 mins and then don't update it and just go onto another ticket, the time worked filed should not update? Even though it runs for 30 mins during which it was opened, it should not update the time as there has been no update on the tickets.

Is that correct?