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Is there a way to disable or hide the working time field entry? It is creating confusion for our attorneys and errors in billing entries. We just want one box to enter billed time. I don’t know why we would do work and not bill it. If we did, we would mark it not billable.

Thanks.

Hi jasonb,

 

We’re gathering feedback and making improvements to this field including the ability to hide it.  The value of this field is in it’s reporting ability.  If durations on time entries change due to some work taking longer or maintaining a client relationship, this field enables the amount of time worked to be maintained vs what the client is billed and sees.  The Time Adjustments report surfaces these differences so they can be managed better. 

Best,


Hi Jasonb,

 

I am having the same problem. It is taking significantly more time to produce invoices. The “time worked” isn’t a metric we track. We only create products based on billable hours. Hopefully there is an update that allows us remove this feature from billing very soon.


Yeah I hate the working time field - please take steps to allow us to remove it.  I am losing a good bit of billable time due to this useless field. As i enter time quickly and then amend throughout the day, I need one field and one field only to enter and update my time.  Thanks. 


I agree. Please get rid of the working time field or allow us to hide it. Entering time records is already a miserable task and that field just makes it more miserable. I appreciate Smokeball trying to make changes that are useful, but this does not help at all - and only creates problems. 


I’ve been having the same issues with my team.  We use the Higher Courts Costs Scale to charge - which does have ‘time based’ items - but they are ‘per six minutes’ - and we treat that as one unit.  Everything else is unit based. We have set up all our fees to be ‘per unit’ because of this. 

I’ve spent the last week getting calls from staff asking ‘which one do I change’ because there’s the option to change both ‘working hours’ or ‘billing’ and they get confused. 

If we have the option to toggle it on and off that’d be super handy.


I’ll add my 2¢ to this thread.  I like the ability to separate it out.  It would be nice for cases where I want to keep up with how much time we’ve spent on a case (like flat fee cases or contingency fee cases) where we are not going to bill time.  The problem is that, unless I’m missing something, you can’t add just “working time.”  If you enter working time but leave the billable time as zero, you get an error message.  

Also, I think the ability to toggle this on and off is probably a good idea.


For flat fee and contingency cases you can still track your time without this “working time” feature. You simply enter a time entry and uncheck the “billable” box. We have been doing that on those types of matters for years without issue.


I am struggling with this new option too and the single entry stating “Services Provided on...” - when I go into each entry and see the drop down list of what work was done - if there is something that billed or counted as billable, it does not appear to matter if I want to change the same to unbillable - it changes on the drop down list but the overall time recorded to bill is not reducing. I cannot understand why and I therefore find myself needing to simply delete work that was recorded as done, but which I do not necessarily want to bill for. This defeats the purpose of being able to show me or my client what actual work was done vs what I am choosing to bill them for.


Maybe I am a dullard, but I don’t know the difference between “working time” and “billing hours”  if I mark something unbillable-- does that mean that working time and billing hours are different?   What’s the thought process behind working time vs. billing time

 


If your collecting feedback, I think the ability to hide it firm wide and/or user by user would be helpful.


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