Tracking Non-Billable Time

As our clients become more familiar with ESC, they also start to become more adventurous with ESC. This exploration breeds new life into facets of the software, opening up new avenues of organization, productivity, and efficiency. Basically, these clients are making ESC work for them, that's what it's all about. Going electronic isn't about trying to balance your current paperwork structure with a digital platform. It's about evolving your business strategy and rethinking your current practices to unlock that freedom.

Tracking vacation, personal, and sick time for employees is a creative feature that many of our clients have implemented in their ESC usage.
What you'll need to get started:

1. A customer for each miscellaneous time you wish to track.
   
   • Note: If you wish to track sick time and vacation time, you'll need to create two customers. If you wish to also include personal time, you'll create a third customer. Be sure to include an address; you can use your business address to simplify things.
2. A priority code to easily track or view these events.
   
   • Note: Attach the priority to your newly created customers so that their dispatches are automatically assigned the unique color dictated by the priority. You can create these priorities by going to Dispatch | Enter Priorities.
3. Setup a dispatch board to show all dispatches.
   
   • Note: By default, dispatch boards are setup to only see current and previous dispatches, so to see future dispatches, we will need to allow a board(s) that capability. While on the EDB, go to Activities | Options, select the specific board and change the Date Mode to All Dispatches, and then Save.

How it works:

You've just approved a vacation request for your technician, Eddie, who will be out of the office from March 24th through March 28th. It's now time to schedule that in ESC...

To begin, we'll first create a dispatch for our Vacation Time customer. On the 1 General tab, you'll notice that the Priority instantly pulls in from the customer record. Now, just tab-through the fields, and make sure you set the Type to non-billable (this will make it so you don't have to create invoices for these dispatches).

Note: In the example, I created a service request code so that some of my notes are automatically generated for me. This is a great timesaving practice!

Next, move to the 2 Schedule tab, select Add Technician, click the specific technician you need and then press Add as many times as days needed. Then, modify the Time and Est Hours column to accurately reflect their time-off. At this point, Save the dispatch.

Now, bring up the EDB (F5), you'll notice that the Week View and Month View have sections of time blocked off for our technician. All we have left to do is complete the dispatch when we're ready. You'll want to make sure that you update the times on their dispatch ticket to accurately reflect the time they were out of the office.

With this practice in place, you can now run a multitude of reports aimed at easily pulling up information in regards to these miscellaneous events for your employees, and it also ensures that you are scheduling your employees as efficiently as possible with better control through the EDB.

Every day we talk to businesses, just like yours, who are doing incredible things with ESC. This concept is just one-of-many ways to bring your company's efficiency to the next level. If you've discovered something clever, effective, and timesaving, that helps push your business to the next level, we'd love to hear about it. After all, there might be another company out there looking for the procedure you implemented. If so, we encourage you to send those ideas our way so we can pay-it-forward to our fellow ESCers!

Written by Scott Haugsjaa
Featured in May 2014 Newsletter