Time logging examples
Basic Life/Work admin
This comes up, this is just very basic stuff such as planning out your day in the morning, getting a cup of tea, stretching out your back etc. Generally, these will be small chunks of time, but time worth logging nonetheless.
Drupal events
- Time spent travelling to and from, and at, Drupal Cons can be logged.
- At present, Drupal events such as User Group meetups and Camps are not considered loggable time as they fall outside regular working hours.
- However, we will support our employees who want go on pre-camp training days in accordance with Co-op Principle 7.
- Business days at Drupal Camps can be logged as normal as they form an important marketing and lead generation function, and are logged under Business Development or Marketing.
- In certain circumstances time spent at Drupal events can be logged - this will be on a case-by-case basis and require the approval of the members.
Events and event expenses
Every member may take up to 5 days per year as paid training or community days. For further guidance see the training and personal development policy.
Internal mandatory events
Such as company away weekends, Agile Collective will pay the normal working hours, tickets, accommodation, fares and expenses for such an event.
External non-mandatory
Events that fall outside of normal working hours (but are work related), you can log up to 2hrs per month as part of your contractual hours. This is of course negotiable if you feel the event has wider benefits, but will need to be included in Forecast if you plan to use this.
Examples of suitable events:
- Drupal User Groups
- Drupal Camps
- Makespace events
- tech4good events
- space4 meets
- General networking
- coop events
Holidays
If you take any paid holiday, this needs to be accounted for in Harvest by logging the time against the Holidays & Leave project.
Meetings
- Client meeting about potential work - But this into “BD General > Meetings” with a note about which client it was for.
- Client meeting about in progress work - This is probably a billable meeting, so assign it as such to the client (although consider whether project billable or support billable)
- Internal meetings - Each meeting probably has a place, so GCM will go in “AC General > Meetings”, but internal meetings about a clients work should go into the client as unbillable, and other meetings are probably within a specific circles remit, so should go in as meetings within those circles projects
Projects
Check with the PM, but generally ALL time on a project (whether unbillable or billable) should get logged against the project. Speak with the PM about how detailed to be on the notes
If you are working on something a project will use, but is ultimately part of R&D speak with the PM about where to log the time best.
Research and development
We are able to claim a proportion of time (and therefore costs) spent on R&D work that is either billable to a project or unbillable. For more information on R&D tax credits, please read the overview.
- For R&D on a project, please log time on the R&D task that is added to a new project by default.
- For unbillable R&D work, please log time on the R&D task within AC Technical.
This applies to direct technical R&D work. We can also claim for supporting workers like project management and admin in general. This time should be logged as normal and will be calculated as part of the reporting process after year end.
Support tickets
You should ALWAYS use the widget on the support ticket, this helps to understand how much time each ticket has “cost” the client.
If there is no ticket, it is not a meeting, and it should still be billable, consider whether creating a new ticket for the work is worthwhile.
Training
There is a “Training and Personal Development” project in Harvest, log all training time to this.
Travel
In general and where possible, we encourage using travel time constructively, but understand that this may not always be possible.
We will endeavour to enable all our employees to work online whilst travelling through the purchase of wifi tokens on trains or using mobile phones as internet hotspots for laptops.
Overtime and TOIL
Sometimes you will work overtime and then need to take this time off as TOIL.
We do not log TOIL as this time has already been logged, in effect, by doing the overtime.
Unbillable time
- General Circle
- Admin - Email, internal chat and communications that don’t fall under meetings, time tracking..
- Meetings - general circle meetings and other non-circle meetings.
- Unlogged - Unbillable time that we cannot account for but when we were working.
- Housekeeping - Cleaning and organising Oxford office.
- Health and sickness - Time off work for sickness and pre-arranged health appointments.
- Holidays and leave - Pre-arranged time off work such as holidays and parental leave.
- Travel - Time spent travelling to events.
- Note: Travel to client meetings is best logged against the client project as unbillable travel.
- Business Development Circle - Anything related to business development and finding new work.
- Marketing Circle- activities around marketing and communications such as writing blog posts, attending events and creating email campaigns.
- Finance Circle - bookkeeping, invoicing, reporting.
- People Circle - HR admin, People circle meetings, appraisals
- Members Circle - members meetings, away days and other strategy stuff.
- Support Circle- admin tasks as part of our Support and Maintenance service and general unbillable support work.
Unlogged time
Logging large chunks of time against the unlogged is generally discouraged. It is important that time is meaningfully logged so that we can assess our time.
It is inevitable that we will lose some time, but using unlogged too much skews valuable reporting on our activities.
Working groups and temporary circles
From time to time, working groups and temporary circles are set up and time spent on these should be logged on the appropriate project in Harvest. There is an AC Working Groups client in Harvest that should be used when creating a new time logging project for a working group.
Other
If something is not covered in the above examples, please ask someone relevant, or the people circle rocket channel if there is nowhere relevant.
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