time worked vs time card - reporting

[Les1]

Looking for advisement around an accurate repository of time worked data for reporting purposes and would like feedback on the behavior i'm seeing currently in our company instances.  I'm trying to advise team members as to what table(s) would be best for reports about time worked for users across tasks?

So with ServiceNow Time Tracking, there are these record types:  Time Worked, Time Cards, and Time Sheets 

For Capturing time there are several methods, but as per DOCS, one can used the Time Worked field or directly enter on a Time Card (which is supposed to aggregate time worked entries for a particular task records -e.g. Incident).

Unexpected behavior:

If i use Time Sheet Portal, adding time goes to a time card but no time_worked entry is created.If adding time via Time Worked field on a task, a time worked record is created AND it is added to a Time Card.

• Additionally the Category of time worked is getting set to "project/project task" even if its on a non-project task type e.g. Incident - so would skew reporting

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Thanks all for providing feedback and helping clear up confusion.

[Les1]

so, on the question about time card category, i see that in our company instance, the dictionary for time_card.category  has default value=project_work

This causes every new time card generated due to Time Worked entry to be categorized as "project/project task" (via the time worked field if displayed on a task record such as Incident). So this field is not dynamically being set based on the type of task record.

So i guess the dilemma is that an Incident, Change or other may be related to a Project, but of course not always or may even be rare depending on the organization.  How can we improve on this field to make it smarter? Or perhaps I should clear the default value (or change it to Task work).