Background
It is a common situation - especially for support contracts - that you charge a defined minimum amount of time or that you do not charge your work on the level of minutes, but you charge e.g. let's say minimum half an hour. A typical scenario could be phone support, and you receive three calls that take a few minutes. From your point of view, it could make sense to charge a minimum amount of money (a minimum amount of tim) for each call, instead of just calculating 3 x 3 minutes and ending up with 9 minutes to charge. For this purpose, ictime offers the possibility to define rounding rules, and for each project, you can assign one of the rounding rules configured here.
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It is obvious that applying rounding rules does not make much sense (or is not fair) within e.g. a development project, because the rounding rule - of course depending on configuration - adds a time overhead to your real time spent. But using a rounding rule is fair for certain situations; a three-minute phone call might have a monetary value far beyond three minutes; if you get disturbed a couple of time a day for a couple of minutes, this justifies charging more than the effective time. |
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Create Rounding Rules
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By default, we assume that no rounding rule will be applied for a project. It is not mandatory to set a rounding rule on project level. |
Create/change/delete rounding rules
You can define as many rounding rules as you need. On project level, you chose one of the existing these rules (see Project Rounding Rule).
SS XXXictime -> Configuration -> Rounding Rules
| Field | Description | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Name | An internal name to identify the rule when configuring the rounding rule on project level. | |
| Minimum Slice | This is the minimum "time slice" used for rounding, i.e. we are always rounding up to e.g. 15 min or 30 min. | You can't configure this. We offer 15 min and a multiple of 15 min. This way, time format can easily be converted into a decimal format for billing purposes. |
| Round Up | This is the limit between rounding down and rounding up. Starting with the value entered, we are rounding up. | |
| Enabled | You can enable/disable rounding rules here. | If a rounding rule gets obsolete, this way you can hide it from the project configuration (as you won't be able to delete it if it had been used already). |
Example:
You have defined the "Minimum Slice" to 30 minutes and have set "Round up" to 6 minutes.
- If you log 3 minutes of time, we would round down to 0 minutes, i.e. in the respective report, nothing would appear to be charged.
- If you log 6 minutes, we would round up to 30 minutes, i.e. you would charge 0,5 hours.
- If you log 8 minutes, we would round up to 30 minutes, i.e. you would charge
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- 0,5 hours.
- If you log 34 minutes, we would round down to 30 minutes, i.e. you would charge 0,5 hours.
- If you log 38 minutes, we would round up to
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It is obvious that applying rounding rules does not make much sense (or: is not fair) within e.g. a development project, because the rounding rule - of course depending on configuration - adds a time overhead to your real time spent. This is fair for certain situations (a three-minute phone call might have a monetary value far beyond three minutes; or if you get disturbed a couple of time a day for a couple of minutes, this justifies XXX
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- 60 minutes, i.e. you would charge 1 hour.
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In general, when displaying or calculating with rounded results, they are displayed as decimal values (0,25; 1,75 etc.) and not in an hour/minute format. |
Modify & Delete Rounding Rules
You can only modify or delete rounding rules not yet used in projects.
| Icon | Description | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
 | Edit rounding rule | only possible if not used in any project |
 | Delete rounding rule | only possible if not used in any project |
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If you need to change a rounding rule that is already used, create a new one and assign the new rule to the respective project(s). |
Assign Rounding Rule to Project
Rounding rules are configured centrally, and for each project you can decide if and which rounding rule you want to use. See Project Rounding Rule.