How long the job took

What time on site is

It's one number on a work order: how many minutes the technician was on site, recorded once when the job is finished. On screen it shows as 2h 15m. If nothing was recorded, it shows as a dash. A dash means nobody recorded a time, which isn't the same as zero, so the two are kept separate everywhere the figure is used.

It goes up in quarter hours, and it can't be more than seven days. A job can run for weeks, but a single visit can't realistically be longer than that, so if someone types an extra digit by mistake, it's refused instead of ending up in a report.

It sits next to hours attending on the job, but the two measure different things. Hours attending is what the technician said when they took the job on: how long until they'd be there. Your customer sees it in their assignment email. Time on site is how long the visit actually took, and your customer never sees it.

Where it gets entered

From the phone, when the job is closed

This is the usual way. The field app's completion screen has a Record time on site switch and a pair of steppers, and it doesn't start at zero. It starts at a suggestion counted from when the technician said they'd arrive, rounded to the nearest quarter hour. The technician should adjust it, and the screen tells them so. Leaving the switch off records "not measured", which isn't the same as zero. There's more detail on the screen in updating a job from the van.

By an administrator, on the job's edit screen

On the website, you don't enter this figure when you complete a job. You can only correct it afterwards. When an administrator edits a work order, there's a field labelled Time on site (minutes), with the hint How long the visit actually took, in 15-minute steps. Leave it empty if nobody recorded it. If you empty the field, the job goes back to having no figure, not zero.

It accepts the same values the phone can produce: whole quarter hours, up to seven days. That way a figure corrected by the office and a figure entered by a technician can always be averaged together. Every change is recorded on the job's timeline like any other edit.

From another system

A job completed through the API can include the figure, in quarter hours like everywhere else. When that system reads the work order, it gets the same suggested time the app starts from. See raising jobs from another system.

Where it shows up

• On the job, next to hours attending, as Time on site.
• On Reports, as the Avg time on site figure for the period. Underneath, it says how many jobs that average covers, because only jobs with a recorded time are counted.
• In a saved report, as a Time On Site column you can tick, on screen and in the CSV. The older legacy export doesn't include it and won't. See reports and saved views.
• On the workload week, added up for each person for the week, next to their job count. See the workload week.

The average can look wrong if you don't know this. It only counts jobs that have a recorded time, and no job from before this feature existed has one. On an account with years of history, an average over the last twelve months may only cover a small number of recent jobs. That's why the tile tells you how many jobs it covers, so check that as well as the number.

What time on site isn't

It's not a timesheet. It's one figure for one job, entered once at the end. WorkOrders doesn't add it up into a person's day or compare it with a shift, and it doesn't record a start or finish time anywhere. It's just a length of time that someone confirmed.

WorkOrders doesn't bill from it. WorkOrders doesn't do quotes, prices or invoices. This figure appears on the job, in an average, and in a spreadsheet column, and that's all. What you do with the spreadsheet is up to you.

It's not an exact measurement. It's whatever the technician confirmed, starting from a suggestion counted from when they said they'd arrive. So a long lunch is included unless they took it out. Keep that in mind if you're looking at a couple of weeks of them for a trend.

Your customer never sees it. It's not in the portal or in any email that goes out from your firm. The only timing a customer gets is the hours attending in their assignment email, and that isn't in the portal either. See the customer portal.