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. half an hour. Let's say you receive three support 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 time) 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 rounding rule.
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 Rounding Rules
You can define as many rounding rules as you need. On project level, you chose one of the existing rules (see Project Rounding Rule).
ictime -> Configuration -> Rounding Rules
SS XXX
| 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. |
| Round Up | This is the limit between rounding down and 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 8 minutes, we would round up to 30 minutes, i.e. you would charge 30 minutes.
- If you log 34 minutes, we would round down to 30 minutes.
- If you log 38 minutes, we would round up to one hour.
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; if you get disturbed a couple of time a day for a couple of minutes, this justifies charging more than the effective time.
Modify & Delete Rounding Rules
You can only modify or delete rounding rules not yet used in projects. If you need to change a rounding rule, create a new one and assign the new rule to the respective projects.