Work Log Attributes (WLA) are en easy and powerful way to enhance your work logs with any kind of additional data you require. You can place one or more WLA on your "Log Work" mask, and can have a different set of WLA (or no WLA at all) depending on project and/or an Activity Type selected by the user.

What Is a Work Log Attribute

A Work Log Attribute (WLA) is a kind of "custom field" for work logs that can be placed on the ictime "Log Work" mask to collect any kind of data that is not part of the ictime default "Log Work" mask. At this moment, we support input text fields and dropdowns as field types, and for dropdowns, data (key-value-pairs) can be managed as static data or can be retrieved from a database with a dynamic query. A WLA can either be related to an Activity Type and/or a JIRA project, so it only appears for certain projects and/or after a user has selected an activity type. Data collected with a WLA is available via the export functionality of ictime Reporting.

Some typical use cases for a WLA are:

• If you do not (or do not only) need information about time spent to charge your work, but have other quantity-based criteria, like pages written, hard disks erased, images converted, disks burnt, ..., you can use a WLA. This way, ictime does not work as a mere time tracking solution any longer, but becomes a kind of general service recording tool.
• If you need aditional criteria like travel expenses, km travelled or fixed cost for a certain job, you can use a WLA.
• If Activity Types are not detailed enough for your purposes and you would need another hierachy level below, you can do that with a WLA.
• If you need accounting information that needs to be tracked on the level of single work logs (so that you can't use a custom field on issue level), you can use a WLA.

Create & Configure Work Log Attributes

WLA List

Create & Edit WLA

WLA Types

Configuring Dropdowns

Static Data

Dynamic Data via SQL Query

Log Work with Work Log Attributes

Create Work Logs

Edit Work Logs

Limitations & Known Issues

At this moment, the main limitation is that WLA are not searchable in Reporting and that values for WLA fields are not displayed in reports, but can only be exported or used via an API. These topics will be addressed in the future, but there are technical limits as regards performance and display (imagine the report details screen for a report that contains multiple projects and these projects have multiple different WLAs, the grid would get a dozen or more additional columns).

Another limitation is that a WLA does not know anything about it's own content, so it is e.g. not possible that ictime aggregates/summarizes values that are numbers. This is also on our roadmap. For the moment, you can do everything with the data based on exported .xls files or you use an API to work with the data in a different system (like your ERP system).