Time Spent Required When Note Added

The rules that determine when the Time spent field of a request, problem, change task or project task becomes required have been adjusted.  The objective of this adjustment is to ensure that people do not forget to specify how much time they have spent working on an assignment whenever it is likely that they have spent a few minutes or more on it.

Previously, Xurrent used the new value that was selected in the Status field to decide whether or not the Time spent field should become mandatory.  For example, when someone set the status of a request to ‘Waiting for…’ or ‘Completed’ the background of the Time spent field would become blue to indicate that a value had to be entered before the record could be saved.

Now, Xurrent looks at whether any text was entered in the Note field.  If the Note field contains text, Xurrent assumes that this text describes work on the assignment and therefore the effort should be specified in the Time spent field.

For requests, which have both a public Note field and an Internal note field, the Time spent field becomes required when either of these fields contains some text.

In a situation where someone added a note to an assignment, but does not want to register any time, it is good to know that a zero, or 0:00, can be entered in the Time spent field.  This satisfies the condition that the Time spent field needs to have a value, yet it ensures that Xurrent does not generate a time entry when the record is saved.

Naturally, the Time spent field will only be available in a request, problem or change task when the ‘Assignment time tracking’ option is activated in the timesheet settings of the organization to which the person who is updating the assignment belongs.