Activity types: see where the hours go
After reading this article you'll be able to set up and maintain your workspace's activity types, pick an activity while tracking time, and see per event, in the staff report and in the payroll export where the hours went.
“14 hours on that event” only tells you half the story. Whether four of them were travel, six on-site service and four tear-down changes your costing for next time — and your conversation with the customer.
That's what activity types are for: a short list your team picks from while tracking time.
Setting up your list
You'll find it under Settings → Status columns → Activity types.
Six values are already there so you can start right away:
- Preparation
- Travel
- Set-up
- On-site service
- Tear-down
- Office
You can rename any of them, change the order (it decides how the picker is sorted), add your own or archive what you don't use.
Archive instead of delete: as soon as hours are attached to an activity, it can no longer be deleted permanently — those hours would lose their assignment retroactively and every report would look different afterwards. An archived activity stays on existing entries but is no longer offered in the picker. You can only delete an archived activity that has no hours left on it.
Each name may exist once per workspace, regardless of upper or lower case. That keeps “Travel” one row in your report instead of three.
Picking one while tracking
The activity is available everywhere time is recorded:
- Topbar stopwatch (desktop and phone) — before you start or while the clock is running.
- Employee portal, both when clocking in and out and when adding hours manually.
- Staff file of an employee, when adding and when correcting an entry.
- On-site tablet when adding an entry afterwards.
Picking one is optional. Leave it empty and nothing changes — making it mandatory at the stopwatch would only mean less gets tracked at all. Unassigned hours show up in the reports as their own “Not specified” row.
Reporting
Per event: on an event's Finances tab, below the target/actual hours you'll find the block Hours by activity — largest first, “Not specified” separately below. The total matches the actual hours above exactly.
Over a date range: the Staff report (Reports → Staff) has an All activities picker at the top. Pick one and the report only counts its hours and wage cost. Unlike the location or tag filter, this one also includes entries without a shift — exactly your office and travel time. The export button next to it keeps the filter.
In the payroll export: the CSV file has an extra Activity column, so you can total by employee and activity in Excel.
Who can do what
- Picking an activity is open to anyone who can track time — no extra permission needed.
- Creating, renaming, archiving and deleting requires the matching rights in the Staff module (create / edit / delete).