Track Hours & Minutes with Time Formula Fields

If you've dabbled with Accelo's Formula Fields, you may already have a few fields configured to help track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), particularly in the Tickets module. If not, take a look by starting a free trial.

Today we introduced a third type of Formula field, which allows you to calculate the time difference between two DateTime fields, down to the final minute! This is helpful for measuring the time elapsed between two statuses when managing your team's Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as their responsiveness and performance across Sales, Tickets or Projects.

If you already have some Number Formula fields set-up to track the days elapsed - which we know were a bit annoying as it always calculated to the nearest whole day - these can now be replaced by Time Formulas to give a result like '2 days, 14 hours & 38 minutes.'

Example: Time to Respond

Say you're using the Tickets module and have Tickets being auto-created when client requests are emailed into Accelo. These might start in the Submitted status and stay that way until someone on the Services team Opens the Ticket and sends the client confirmation that their Ticket is in progress. Tracking the data on this Time to Open, or Time to Respond is now easily possible with a simple Time Formula field.

"Hold on..." (you might be thinking), "...are the built-in Submitted and Opened date fields actually DateTime fields?"

Fortunately, yes, which makes it possible to get an accurate time difference. However, some built-in date fields don't have a timestamp and therefore when used in these formulas will not give the most accurate results, since they'll assume 12 AM on the selected date.

Example: Time Spent by Another Team

Before resolving a Ticket, you might need to send it through Quality Assurance testing, which is performed by another team, or perhaps an external party. So, you might have a custom DateTime field to record exactly when the solution was pushed out for QA. When QA respond with the thumbs-up, you might Resolve the Ticket. So to track this time we subtract "Pushed to QA" from the "Resolved Date". However, your internal team might always run an internal test suite which takes 60 minutes, so you could configure the formula to always add this on top by appending a 60-minute addition to the formula:

Note that Formula Fields are only available in the Premium tier of Accelo. If you're thinking about upgrading, have any questions or feedback - please reach out via [email protected]