Module · Work logs

Where to find it in the app

• Use it: Time & pay → Job diary
• Turn it on/off: your business name (top-left) → Settings → Modules → Time & pay → Job diary

Plan: Solo and Business · Module group: Your team · Navigation: Time & pay → Job diary

1. Overview

Purpose. A record of what your team actually worked on, so you can bill for it, look back at what was done for a customer, and see how much captured work has not been invoiced yet.

This is not a second timesheet, and the distinction is the whole point:

Work-log minutes never touch pay, and pay rates never appear anywhere in this module. You can use either tool without the other.

Off by default. A cafe that never bills for time has no use for it, so nothing appears until you switch it on. When it is off the app behaves exactly as it did before, and switching it back on restores everything.

2. Turning it on

Your business name (top-left) → Settings → Modules → Your team → Work logs.

Then open Time & pay → Job diary and use the Settings button, top-right, to set it up. Everything there is yours to edit:

• Categories. The kinds of work your team can log. Each one carries its own "chargeable by default" and, if you want, its own hourly rate. Five sensible ones are seeded; rename, reprice, delete or add as you like.
• Default hourly rate. Used when a category has no rate of its own. Leave it blank and chargeable work simply waits for you to price it, rather than going onto an invoice at nothing.
• Rounding. None (the default), or 6, 15 or 30 minutes, to nearest or always up. See section 5.
• Forgotten-timer cap. How long a running timer can go before the app closes it. Default 12 hours.

3. How your team records work

Staff use the My work log card on My work. Two ways in:

• Start timer. Starts immediately, no questions asked. A running bar shows the time so far; details can be added while it runs or after it stops. Only one timer can run per person at a time, and it lives on the server, so it survives a reload, a locked phone, or moving to another device.
• Add work. The manual path. Type the time as 1:30, 90, 1.5h or 45m, pick the kind of work, and you are done. A bare number under 12 is read as hours, above that as minutes.

Then, optionally: a customer, a note saying what was done, and the chargeable tick (which defaults from the kind of work).

Staff see only their own entries. That is fixed, not a setting. The framing is "your work diary", not "we are watching you".

From a shared tablet. If you run a kiosk, you can add a Log work tile to it (kiosk settings, under the tile list). Whoever is using the tablet identifies themselves exactly as they do to clock on, by tapping their name or typing their personal PIN, whichever you chose, so the stricter setting is not weakened by a second way in. The tile only ever writes: nobody's logged work is shown back on a screen the whole room can see. Kiosk entries are always internal, because a shared device should not be able to put money against a customer's name; a manager can open the entry afterwards and charge it if it should be charged.

From a booking. If the work was for something already in the diary, open the booking and use Log work in its Work section. The customer, the date and the scheduled length are filled in for you, and all three stay editable, because how long a job was booked for and how long it took are not the same thing. Work logged this way is listed on the booking, so the booking becomes the record of what was actually done. A booking still in the future dates the entry today rather than a day that has not happened.

4. The manager view

Time & pay → Job diary shows three figures for the period: hours logged, chargeable %, and the dollar value not yet billed. Beneath that is the list, filterable by period, person and state, with a dot on each row:

• Teal chargeable, not yet billed
• Grey already billed
• Hollow internal work
• Amber stopped automatically, needs checking

Tap any row to edit it. Log work records an entry, including on behalf of someone else (which covers team members who have no login). Export downloads the filtered list as a CSV of raw minutes.

Utilisation

If you use the roster, a quiet Utilisation panel sits below the list: for each person, the chargeable hours they logged as a share of the hours they were rostered, one month at a time. Leave, closures and unpaid breaks are already taken off the rostered side, so a fortnight of annual leave does not read as a collapse.

Someone with no shifts that month shows no roster rather than 0%, because there is nothing to divide by. Rows are listed by name.

There is deliberately no target, no ranking and no red text. This is a figure about the shape of the business, useful for spotting a month where too little of the team's time reached a customer. It is not a scoreboard, and using it as one is the fastest way to stop people logging honestly.

The panel does not appear at all if the roster module is off.

5. Putting the work on an invoice

Two ways in, both needing invoicing rights:

• From the customer. Their record shows an unbilled work chip, for example "3.0h unbilled, about $390.00". Tapping it starts an invoice for them.
• From the invoice. In a new or draft invoice, Add unbilled work opens a picker of everything chargeable and not yet billed for that customer.

In the picker, tick what to bill and choose how it reads on the invoice: one line per visit (the default), a single summary line, or one line per entry with notes. Amounts are worked out live from your current rates, so fixing a rate in Settings fixes every future bill. The invoice line is where the price becomes real, and you can still edit it.

Work with no rate anywhere is shown but cannot be ticked. It is left off rather than billed at nothing.

Nothing is marked as billed until you save the invoice, and the marking is conditional: if a colleague billed the same work a moment earlier, yours is not double-billed, and the invoice tells you how many entries to check.

Voiding an invoice, or deleting a draft, releases its work back to unbilled. The work still happened, so it becomes available for the replacement invoice. If you instead deleted the line by hand, open the entry from Work logs and use Mark as unbilled.

Parts from stock

Jobs can carry parts as well as labour. Adding a part from your Stock list records what was used, takes it off your on-hand count in the same step, and suggests a charge-out price, most specific rule first: a sale price pinned on the stock item, then a markup set on that one item, then your usual markup from Work logs settings. With no sale price and no markup anywhere, the price is left blank to type. It is only ever a suggestion, editable on the job. One-off parts (something bought just for this job) can be typed straight in without a stock item.

Staff assigned to a job can record parts on it when Staff can record parts on jobs assigned to them is switched on in Work logs settings; they choose the part and quantity but never see what a part cost you. Cost prices and margins stay with managers. When the job is billed, its parts land on the invoice alongside the labour.

6. Rounding, and why it works the way it does

Rounding applies only when work goes onto an invoice, and to a whole visit rather than to each entry. Three ten-minute jobs in one day are billed as thirty minutes, not as three separate round-ups to forty-five.

Reports always show the honest raw minutes, and changing the setting later only affects future billing. An invoice already raised carries its own quantities and never changes underneath your customer.

7. Forgotten timers

If someone leaves a timer running, it is closed at your cap and flagged needs checking. Such an entry is kept off invoices until a person confirms the real minutes, because billing an invented duration is worse than billing nothing. Confirming the minutes and saving clears the flag.

This mirrors how auto clock-out works on timesheets: the app will tidy up after you, but it will never quietly turn a guess into money.

8. Who can do what

Logging your own work needs no permission at all. Seeing the team's needs worklogs.view; setting charge-out rates is a pricing decision, so it needs worklogs.manage.

An entry can be edited by the person who wrote it while it is unbilled, and by a manager at any time. Once work is on an invoice it locks, because changing the minutes afterwards would contradict what the customer was charged.

9. Privacy

Notes can contain customer details, so they never appear on any public page. The only place work-log text reaches a customer is the description on an invoice line, which you write and can edit before sending.

Staff who cannot open the customer list can still choose a customer when logging work. The picker returns names only, never contact details.