Feature Suggestion – Task Time Allocation and Actual Time Comparison

Hi there Guest,

I voted for your suggestion. Some of the things you would like developed could already be available, albeit needing further improvements or some flexibility on your part to make it work for you. So here are some suggestions, which you may or may not find useful:

• Allocated Time - this already exists but generated automatically by the system. I do not have any idea how the system decides how much time to allocate to such tasks. To my knowledge, this is not something users can set up for now but if I were you, I would log on a separate idea suggesting that these could be user defined as opposed to system defined, or keep both options. For instance, when setting up a client on the system, you could have the ability to allocate time by service. In the mean time, to check/amend the time allocated of a system generated task, all you have to do is Edit a task and amend the Time Estimate filed under the Time Status section. I realise this is not practical to use if you have a lot of tasks to update manually and have to spend the time amending time estimates every time a new task is generated. On the positive side, if a Time Estimate field is already present in the system, then it is highly likely that something will be done with this

• Internal Completion Deadline - you could use target dates or if you can spare the time, set up 'workflows' where you can set up workflow deadlines in order to have your own practice target dates. We use workflows a lot in our practice and this has improved our efficiency greatly. At present, you can only sort your tasks by workflow deadlines. You can't yet report or filter tasks using workflow deadlines but the more people push for this, the more likely it will happen. :-) I can tell you that the development team is currently working on reports including workflow deadlines but they can't say at present when this will be made available

• Actual Time Spent field - this already exists. When workflows became available, our practice stopped using the 'target dates' system. So please bear this in mind as I have no idea if the Task Details pane is showing up when a practice uses the 'target dates' system. When using workflows, when you click on the Workflow Progress bar or the Latest Progress Note field, the Task Details window appears on the right hand side of the screen. It has 3 x tabs: Workflow, Details and Progress Notes. In the Details pane, there is a field with all the time spent on the task, which is called 'Logged Time' and it gives you the total time logged on the task. I spoke to the person who designed the Task Details pane when they first introduced the new Tasks View. I remember telling her that it would be a great idea to have a 4th Tab called 'Time' where you could see all the time log entries from your staff. Your suggestion makes me think that it would be great to be able to see on top of that pane the 'Time Estimate' against the total 'Time Logged' on the task. Again, this could be logged as a separate idea. :-)

• Allocated time and actual time spent comparison - I don't think there is an Insight report for that yet but I could be wrong. I would check the Insights reports available (Tools/Insights), maybe call support to ask them if that report already exists and if so, to help you with building it, and if it doesn't, suggest that they had it to the list of available Insights report

• Ability to carry forward allocated time and other points - As detailed above, the system generates Time Estimates for tasks automatically. This is something that could be developed further to allow users to automate and manage allocated time more efficiently so that it can serve their circumstances best. From that point onwards, these new features could be made available to work with in Insights reports and to view in the Overview page

I hope this helps!

Kind regards,

David M