Timer Auto-Start Voting

DCal

For me and for my techs, we all track our time based on arrival and departure for a solid 50% of our tickets.

The timer auto-starting when entering a ticket is a bit of a nuisance for us, since we are going to enter our time manually anyways. (We do a lot of on-site and some cabling work as well, so having the timer arbitrarily started doesn't help, since tickets are usually made well before on-site).

This means that for 90% of our work, we need to Click the reset for the timer, agree to reset it, then enter our time manually anyways. Especially since we bill in 15 minute increments, like I know a lot of MSPs tend to do. Per quarter, half hour, or hour, etc.

I'd love to see an option under Settings > Tickets simply called "Timer Auto-start" with a simple toggle. Toggle off, timer doesn't start counting, fields stay the same, but techs can enter their "time spent" without needing to constantly reset the timer.

It's also a pain in the arse when we forget to change ticket status, open the ticket back up, change status, save, then realize doing that added a random amount of time to the ticket. We then have to delete the entry, reset the timer, change the status, then save.

And another small feature. Can we just out-right turn off the "Number of hours to auto close resolved tickets" as a setting as well?

Resolved is for my techs to mark something as fixed. I then mark them as "Closed" manually once billing has been completed. I never want a ticket to irreversibly be "Closed" without doing it manually. The has lead to me entering "999999" in the field to prevent tickets from ever "Auto-closing" and missing billing statuses.

If you could point me to where the timer auto-start function is, I'd love to manually disable it for now. It's driving one of our techs to madness apparently lol. I'm sure you know how it goes.

DCal

I found where the timer starts upon page load.

js/ticket_time_tracking.js

I changed this:

    try {

        displayTime();

        if (!localStorage.getItem(getLocalStorageKey("startTime")) && !localStorage.getItem(getLocalStorageKey("pausedTime"))) {

            startTimer();

        } else if (localStorage.getItem(getLocalStorageKey("startTime"))) {

            startTimer();

        }

        // Check and pause timer if status is pending

        checkStatusAndPauseTimer();

    } catch (error) {

        console.error("There was an issue initializing the timer:", error);

    }

To this:

  try {

  	displayTime();

  	// Remove auto-start behavior - timer only starts when user clicks start button

  	if (localStorage.getItem(getLocalStorageKey("startTime"))) {

  		// Optional: resume previously running timers

  		startTimer(); 

  	}

  	

  	// Check and pause timer if status is pending

  	checkStatusAndPauseTimer();

  } catch (error) {

  	console.error("There was an issue initializing the timer:", error);

  }

For my purposes, this only starts the timer if it was previously started by a tech.

A toggle could likely be added here that pulls from the settings.

johnny

yeah I agree I think the timer should not autostart by default we may not even need an option unless anyone concurs.

johnny

Lets vote on this

wrongecho

This has come up over and over and it's one where we seemingly can't make everyone happy. Some people want an auto start timer, some people don't, some people don't want a timer at all but want to manually log mins, some people want a choose a specific start/stop date and time. Some people don't care about time tracking and want it gone altogether.

Bigbug

wrongecho bro, not tryna start a war here… 🤣
just saying, every time this gets brought up, you’re literally the only one on the other side of this…

With much respect 🙏

DCal

wrongecho

This statement, I feel, would be a prime example of a requirement for a toggle or setting.

If half the people want to auto-start, and the other half prefer it to run automatically, then it's prime real-estate for a toggle.

I don't want to sound like an asshole, but if I had to write a lecture on "when to implement a setting vs a change", it'd reference this post as an outstanding example.

wrongecho

Bigbug I don't think that's quite accurate, I've seen other say their preference is that it starts automatically in the past too. Either way, I think my opinion is just as valid as everyone else's. You also missed the bit about how popular the request for entering a manual date and time for start and end. This isn't my preference, but it is incredibly popular.

Either way, perhaps you should focus on ideas rather than the people holding them.

Also @DCal reading your post again about billing, you can just set a ticket as billable to avoid this whole Resolved/Closed thing. If you're doing billing outside ITFlow then I've seen others basically just have a custom status for "Complete - to be invoiced" which kinda works.

magixnetworks

I personally don't have a problem with the timer auto starting but I do think it needs a bit of tweaking as I have never had a case where it's been accurate

I have a ticket that's been open a while because it's waiting on the customer so the ticket now has an insanely high timer

I've used alot of different ticketing systems in my day and none of them really get this right.
The closest I liked was when a ticket was opened it was locked to you and the timer would continue as long as you had this ticket locked. If you put it on hold the timer would stop. The downside to this particular system was you could only work on one ticket at a time and you only had a little bit of control over which ticket that was.

JosephWithCOR

I sometimes use the auto-ticket timer when I am standing here working tickets to help track my time.

But then Squirrel…

Ooo… Shiny…

and then I have to reset the timer anyway.

wrongecho

DCal

You seemed to miss the part where the other portion of people would prefer to change how the timer works entirely to a start / stop datetime input.

As for not sounding like an arsehole lecturer, well…

DCal

wrongecho

I wouldn't mind a start stop date-time system, similar to ConnectWise PSA. But this would be a major code change, and I didn't think it'd get a green light due to that, otherwise I would have made that my feature request instead. It could boil down to 2 settings overall. Simple Time Tracker < Toggle > Advanced Time Tracker. When Simple Time Tracker is selected, Timer Auto-start On < Toggle > Off. But I have no idea how you'd handle this on the database side of things. I can only imagine the hell it'd be. Replace with Null entries maybe? But what happens when you toggle back on? Seems very 1 way decision-y to toggle, and horrible to implement.

A timer auto-start toggle would be insanely simple to implement though. Assuming there isn't a planned overhaul of the timer system already.

And apologies for that, in all fairness, I am an asshole, but I try not to sound like an asshole if that makes sense lol.

I also don't want it to seem lost on me, I am greatly appreciative for all the work everyone has put into this application! I'm always amazed by the level of support and effort put into this project! I cannot thank everyone enough, and I'm happy with what I have. I've been given more than enough for free to warrant spending my own time tweaking our install to my picky needs if it doesn't seem fit for the masses. I'd offer to help, but I'd bung up the codebase if given responsibility of anything beyond my instance. I am learning though, so maybe one day!