How long the job took

What time on site is

One number on a work order: how long the technician was actually there, in minutes, recorded once when the job is finished. On screen it reads as 2h 15m. Where nothing was recorded it reads as a dash — and that is a different answer from zero, which is why the two are kept apart everywhere this figure is used.

It moves in quarter hours, and there is a ceiling of seven days. The ceiling is not a rule about how long a job may take — a job can run for weeks — it is a bound on what a single visit can plausibly be, so a fat-fingered extra digit is refused at the door rather than averaged into a report.

It sits beside hours attending on the job and means the opposite end of it. Hours attending is what somebody said when they took the job on — how long until they would be there — and your customer reads it in their assignment email. Time on site is what the visit turned out to be, and your customer never sees it at all.

Where it gets entered

From the phone, as the job is closed

The usual way. The field app's completion screen has a Record time on site switch and a pair of steppers, and it does not open at zero — it opens at a suggestion counted from when the technician said they would arrive, rounded to the nearest quarter hour. It is a starting point to correct, not a measurement to agree with, and the screen says as much. Leaving the switch off is a real answer: it records "not measured", which is not the same as none. The control field by field is in updating a job from the van.

By an administrator, on the job's edit screen

On the website the figure is not part of completing a job — it is a correction. An administrator editing a work order gets a field labelled Time on site (minutes), hinted How long the visit actually took. In 15-minute steps; leave empty if it was never recorded. Emptying it puts the job back to having no figure rather than to zero.

It accepts exactly what the phone can produce — whole quarter hours, nothing over seven days — because the office correcting a figure and a technician entering one must not be able to produce two numbers that cannot appear in the same average. Every edit is written to the job's timeline like any other change.

From another system

A job completed over the API can carry the figure with it, under the same quarter-hour rule, and the work order it reads back offers the same suggestion the app starts its control at. See raising jobs from another system.

Where it turns up

• On the job, beside hours attending, as Time on site.
• On Reports, as the Avg time on site figure for the period — captioned with how many jobs it is actually over, because it can only average the jobs that carry it.
• In a saved report, as a Time On Site column you can tick, on screen and in the CSV. The frozen legacy export does not carry it and never will; that is the point of the second exporter. See reports and saved views.
• On the workload week, added up per person for the week, next to their job count — see the workload week.

A note on that average, because it will look wrong if you do not know this: it counts only the jobs that carry a figure, and no job that predates this feature does. On an account with years of history behind it, an average over the last twelve months describes a small and recent slice of that year. The tile says how many jobs it is over for exactly that reason — read the caption, not just the number.

What time on site is not

It is not a timesheet. It is one figure against one job, entered once at the end. Nothing accumulates it into a person's day, nothing compares it with a shift, and there is no start or finish time recorded anywhere — only a duration somebody confirmed.

Nothing bills off it. WorkOrders does not quote, price, invoice or charge for anything, and this figure is no exception: it appears on a job, in an average and in a spreadsheet column, and that is the whole list. What you do with the spreadsheet is your business.

It is not a measurement. The number that reaches you is whatever the technician confirmed, from a suggestion that counts from when they said they would arrive — so a long lunch is in there unless they took it out. It is worth knowing that when a fortnight of them is being read as a trend.

Your customer never sees it. It is on neither the portal nor any email that leaves your firm. The only figure a customer is given about timing is the hours attending in their assignment email, and even that is not on the portal — see the customer portal.