Rounding should group project time

[bundabrg]

Description

In the latest release time can be rounded in reports. It states that this is done for each time entry rather than accumulated time.

I believe this should still group the time accumulated in a day for the same project.

For example if I perform the following:

1. Book 5 minutes for Project1
2. Book 5 minutes for Project2
3. Book another 5 minutes for Project1 (later in the day)
4. Book another 5 minutes for Project2 the next day

If I was rounding up to the nearest 30 minutes I would expect the report to show:

Today:

• Project1: 30 minutes (The two 5 minutes are added together, then rounding applied)
• Project2: 30 minutes (5 minutes rounded up)

Tomorrow:

• Project2: 30 minutes (5 minutes rounded up)

Instead it shows:

Today:

• Project1: 60 minutes (each 5 minutes to same project rounded up)
• Project2: 30 minutes

Tomorrow:

• Project2: 30 minutes

I personally also round down when its only a certain percentage (IE lets say its less than 3 minutes over) across a boundary but that feels like a more niche thing I use.

Notes

1. This is not a trivial change and perhaps a better idea is to work with it as it is and just edit up times as needed or continue. This is due to the fact of taking into account Tasks, and how to display the merged entries (does one just merge the descriptions together for the day so that you get a single line showing everything done for a particular project). The way I do it is to merge all descriptions of the same project together (separated by a newline) for the day and show the the total time duration.

Steps To Reproduce

...

Self-hosted or Cloud?

Self-Hosted

Version of solidtime: (for self-hosted)

0.9.0

solidtime self-hosting guide: (for self-hosted)

No response

[Onatcer]

Thanks for the feature request, I will convert this into a discussion because we handle feature requests in discussion. It is unlikely that we will add specific rules to the project rounding, but there might be a more generalized solution that we can implement in the future which (if i understand it correctly) would address your issue.

We discussed the implementation of this feature primarily based on the aspect of where the rounding should happen

• on the individual time entry (current implementation)
• on the aggregated group

All other time tracking solutions we looked at also do it on the individual time entry level and the main reason for this is that rounding on the aggregation group will cause inconsistencies between different groupings (f.e. group and sub-group as implemented in our report).

f.e. if we group on the Project and Sub-Group on the Task, track 25 minutes on Project1-Task1, 25minutes on Project1-Task2 and 25 minutes on Project1-Task3 and then round to nearest with 1 hour intervals on the project level, we will have 1:15 rounded to 1 hour on the Project1 level. In the tasks level however we do not really have a way of displaying the values in a way that is consistent with the rounded project time value. rounding the task time in the same way would show 0, 0, 0 and showing the real time would be 25m, 25m, 25m, which is more than what is in the project is showing.

If I understand your issue correctly it could be solved by grouping per day and sub-grouping per project, with rounding applied to the sub-group. In that case we can take the values of the sub groups (project) and add them up to calculate the value of the group (day).

In order to keep the API and Interface consistent we would in my opinion need a solution for

• rounding on the group level while keeping consistency with the sub-group items (or at least make sure that users understand how those values are calculated and why they might differ)
• find a solution for the bar chart that shows tracked time based on a daily/weekly/montly chart, because this can also cause inconsistencies on the same page f.e. in the default config where the chart shows hours based on the day and the table shows project (group) and tasks (sub group).

as far as i know toggl is currently testing out a rounding feature with rounding based on the grouped/accumulated. if anyone has access to this feel free to let me know if/how they are handling the challenges described earlier.

also if anyone has thoughts of feedback on this feel free to comment below.

[bundabrg]

Thanks for the feedback and looking at this. I've had a long think and I think that this is actually a complex topic as everyone will want their own rules when generating a report, probably too many to think about supporting. Also when you start taking into account multiple members and clients and how to handle rounding between them all it gets difficult to know where to draw the lines.

I think what some time keeping apps do is just have a rounding on how the time is recorded. IE, your start time and end times whilst logging round to a number. This has its own issues as well.

What I've decided to do is to generate the reports outside of SolidTime which gives me more flexibility on how the report is presented as well as allowing me full control over how I want times to rounded. I've made this available at https://github.com/bundabrg/solidreport for anyone who finds it useful. It allows one to edit how a report is generated as well as edit the templates themselves. Also allows passing in resources like a logo or a custom stylesheet. Templates are in jinja2 format and reports are generated using python by querying the database directly.

So far the one report I have there at the moment is a 'Staff Times'. Its intended to be sent to accounts and is divided into two parts. The top part summarises staff times and allows accounts to quickly add their hours into a payroll. The bottom part provides details to allow someone to audit that work is in fact being done. Staff times in this case are added up for the day and then rounded up to the nearest 30 minutes unless they are within 15% of a boundary (4.5 minutes) in which case they are rounded down unless it would round to 0 in which case it rounds up. The rounded times are shown in the summaries and left of the details, whereas the actual times are in the right column of the details.

Examples below:

Thanks again for the very useful tool.