The technician timesheet: travel, on site, and the hour nobody codes

A usable field timesheet is a list of time segments. Each names the job it belongs to — or an explicit code saying it belongs to none — with a start, an end, a category, the source that produced those times, and an append-only trail of corrections. A day is the sum of its segments.

The reason is arithmetic. A technician clocks on at 07:00 and off at 16:30, and the platform reports 9.5 hours. The 5 jobs on the board account for 6.2 hours on site. The remaining 3.3 hours are real, paid and invisible, and every labour report built on that day is wrong. The record makes those hours nameable.

One segment, field by field

Corrections are normal — a technician forgets to stop the clock and the segment runs to 19:00 — and the response is an appended correction, never an overwrite. Append-only is also what lets segments survive a sync collision that loses free-text notes on the same record, the asymmetry in the dispatcher's change and the tech's change both vanished.

The 6 categories that make a day add up

• Travel. Between stops, first and last legs flagged separately — whether the drive from home counts is decided in does the drive from home count.
• On site. The only category most platforms record well, and the one mistaken for the whole day.
• Waiting. Locked gate, no keyholder, tenant out, induction queue. Rarely captured, and the biggest source of unexplained hours.
• Shop. Loading, restocking, paperwork, van maintenance. Recurring, never billable.
• Supplier. Counter collections and returns, belonging to the job that caused them.
• Non-productive. Training, toolbox talks, breaks, admin. Naming it stops it smearing into the on-site figure.

The hours nobody codes do not disappear. They land wherever is easiest to tap.

Tap, geofence or inferred: where the times come from

Tap-only capture under-reports the gaps: a technician annoyed about a locked gate does not open an app to log a waiting segment. That is not a training problem. Geofencing is the usual supplement, and it is approximate.

Clocks that disagree, and the day captured with no signal

Time is the one field where the device is an unreliable narrator: clocks drift, time zones change mid-route, and a user can set the clock by hand. Capture 3 values per stamp — device wall-clock, a monotonic elapsed reading that cannot move backwards, and the server-received time at sync. A gap between the first 2 flags the segment for review.

Offline, every segment is a queued write — the mechanism in what offline-first means for a work order. One case needs handling: a session expiring mid-shift can strand a clock-out on a device that cannot reach the server, the failure in logged out in a basement. Capture it anyway, reconcile later.

What the timesheet must not be asked to do

It records duration and category. It does not price them. Loaded rates, overhead and per-job margin belong to what a job cost record has to contain; a rate stored on the segment freezes an annually changing number into a record kept for years.

Nor is it a utilisation target — it supplies the honest input to one, and to route planning, because measured on-site durations by job type stop a recurring schedule sliding later each cycle, the drift in quarterly pest services drift later every year. Segments captured beside the photo set a completed job should carry make a disputed visit answerable a year later.

As a build it is small and high-leverage: 6 categories, 1 segment table, an append-only edit trail, a confirmation on every geofenced stamp — work we scope under MVP and product builds, within the technician's phone and our field service work.

• time tracking
• field data
• mobile apps
• record design