Option to actually add up presence times

[ralf1070]

Currently the working contract plugin adds up task durations per day. This has several drawbacks for an actual working contract time recording:

• At least here billable hours are rounded to a quarter of an hour - the working contract is 8 hours a day, starting when you check in, ending when you check out. This does not sum up correctly.
• It is not unusual that tasks overlap. In this case the overlap is counted twice for the working contract time sheet. When tracking on-call times as tasks, when completing tasks, while in a tracked meeting - co-workers do sum up up to twice the actual daily hours as working time.

It would be nice to have an option to drop overlaping times and not use rounded durations for sum up, but use actual start and end times of tasks for daily working hours:

Count starts with start time of first task a day, stops when the number of active jobs is zero, resumes when the next job is started and ends with the end time of the last task this day. To the minute.

[kevinpapst]

The roadmap contains a change to actually count the exact logged times, instead of the rounded duration.

The second request is nothing I plan to add.
What about longer breaks (e.g. absence for a doctor visit) or night shifts ... that's a call for problems.
So the actual calculation will not be changed: only tracked time will be summed up.

But as I said, unrounded duration should be used in the future.

[ralf1070]

Does the internal structure allow to process these times in a plugin we could create ourselfs? To not count times twice is actually an issue to us.

Breaks would stop the counting - number of jobs is zero ...

[kevinpapst]

Ah, I misunderstood your last sentence.

Count starts with start time of first task a day, stops when the number of active jobs is zero, resumes when the next job is started and ends with the end time of the last task this day. To the minute.

Thought you want to collect the time between these two events.

Does the internal structure allow to process these times in a plugin we could create ourselfs? To not count times twice is actually an issue to us.

This might not be very constructive, but in my personal opinion nobody can work on two tasks at the same time.
I understand that you track it and that it causes issues, but it does not reflect reality.
Building such a logic might be possible, but I tried it once and it was pretty problematic.

Aren't there other and more simple solutions?
Like a "phone" button in Kimai that stops the running entry, creates a new one for the short-term-distraction-task and restarts the old one, as soon as the distraction is over?

[ralf1070]

Aren't there other and more simple solutions?
Like a "phone" button in Kimai that stops the running entry, creates a new one for the short-term-distraction-task and restarts the old one, as soon as the distraction is over?

Nice idea - I will ask my co-workers. These guys find one excuse after another to not have to do an additional click if anyhow possible. Is this something you could easily add?

Back to the initial question:
Kimai supports parallel tasks - so there is a concept of having two things done in parallel. And this oncept is helpful. But a person (in a single contract, for a single employer) can only be once on site. Should this not be resolved in some way? The current state - counting time of parallel tasks twice for work time - is kind of broken.

Yes, I can imagine pitfalls for this logic - you already named some - but let's say we don't go for a common solution:
Do you think there is a clean way to add custom code for this computation - to add our very own, very special way to sum up our times? I currently don't know enough - actually nothing - about this plugin to be able to evaluate.

The very point about it:
We don't want to have to track times at different places - Tasks with billable hours here, work time there, holidays in just another place. It should be done in one place, with a bare minimum of necessary interactions. Kimai seems to be a good tool for that... there is just this little, last problem ;)

... and yes - this "close current task, start new task and resume old task when done"-Button could be a way to work...

BTW: Thanks a lot for your work!