My journal entries report – v3.4 Knowledge Base

My journal entries report shows all the time and costs recorded in RefTracker by the signed on user, for the selected period. It relates to full questions only (for information about DeskStats see the My DeskStats report). It is particularly useful for staff whose time is billed, and is accessed from the body of the staff home page, or from the menu list under Home.

Your System administrator will make this function available to you if you need to review the time you have entered over a period of time to ensure that it has all been entered – an invaluable aid for checking that you have entered all of the time that you have spent answering requests, whether your time is used for billing purposes, or just to validate the types of work that your service is delivering, and the areas of your organisation that are benefiting from it.

There are two modes of operation of this function:

display by Journal entry – each individual action you saved with time used or cost incurred – use it to check that you recorded all the individual pieces of work you did.
display by Question – time used totaled by each question – use it to complete your time sheet.

There is also an Export function that provides the information in this screen plus all other client contact information (If this has not been denied by your System administrator), into a spreadsheet. This might be helpful for passing your time used out for billing, if your System administrator has not set up the process for automatically passing the time you and all other staff accumulated in RefTracker, to your billing system.

Use the Record time function under Actions to record more time in relation to any particular question, if necessary. Ask your System administrator to make an adjustment if you find that you have recorded too much time for any activity.

Using the My journal entries report

When you display “My journal entries” report, it displays using the same parameters that you used for this screen last time – so choosing “Yesterday” will mean that next time you use this function it will automatically display results for the day before the current day.

The Display by Journal entry option, shown above, shows all time and costs recorded for the selected period in most recent to least recent order, i.e. with most recently done work at the top.

The Display by Question option, shown above, shows all time recorded for the selected period, totaled for each question worked on during the selected period, with the newest question at the top. Your System administrator can change the columns that appear in this report (System administrators can click here for details of how to do that). Use Display by Question if you need to complete time sheets.

Use Display by Journal entry if the values showing do not seem to be right. Because the Journal entry view shows the work in the order that you did it, it will be more obvious where you might have missed recording some time. You can also use the question number hyperlinks in these reports to go directly to the Journal tab of the Summary screen to view all time entered for that particular question.

If the time you enter into RefTracker is taken out to a billing system you should use this screen to review the time entries that are about to be taken out, before they go. General users and above will usually have access to this function if Time used is enabled in your system (System administrators can remove it from any individual user by denying that Function in the user’s signon.

The columns that appear in this report can be amended, for example you might need a Practice group column added. Your system administrator should contact their Altarama support representative to have this change made (instructions are at the end of the Statistics – Journal Entry Reporting help page in the Supervisor section).

The date selection options at the top of the screen allow a different period to be selected. Easy options to select “This month”, “Last month”, “Today” and “Yesterday” are provided along with a “Selected dates” option that allows any specific date range to be specified. The system remembers the data selection that you used last and automatically presents the result for that date range the next time you enter this screen.

The Service type selection options at the top of the screen allows this report to show just the time spent on Customer service, Internal tasks, or KB entries, or any combination of these.

The Totals: Time used display (at the top right of the results table) shows the total amount of time recorded for the signed on staff member during the selected period. This is a handy feature when checking the work entered for today or yesterday – does it reflect the amount of time that you spent answering questions during that period? Do you need to add more time (click the relevant question number and use Record time under Actions), or ask an Administrator to adjust an entry that is too high?

Should you wish to view the time records in a different sort order, click the appropriate column heading. Each column can be set to sort in ascending, descending, or unsorted order. Click the column heading to move through the options. When a column is contributing to the sort order it shows in a grey colour. When more than one column contributes to the sort order, precedence is left to right. For example, to see all journals in Question number order click the Date column until it shows unsorted, then, click the “Question #” text in the column heading and the sort order will change so that time recorded for the lowest question number is displayed first. The arrow that appears in the column that has been used to determine sort order, indicates whether the sort order is ascending or descending.

Should you want to record more time in relation to a specific question, click on its question number. You will be taken to the Journal tab of the Summary screen for that question where you can check all the time allocated to that question, and then select Record time from the Actions menu list, if you need to add more time (and have been given permission to do that). You can also use the Change screen, and the Answer screen, if the question is still open, to add more time.

The Question column not only provides the Question text, but it also provides a summary of the client contact information in the same format as is provided by the Open questions screen.

An option to allow the time records to be exported is also provided. The system will export in an HTML format for Excel that encodes characters that Excel cannot handle, limits output to the 32K characters per field that Excel can handle and displays only a manageable subset of very long data fields until you double click in the cell. It also provides a question number hyperlink back to RefTracker facilitating adjustments, and retains hyperlinks in Questions).

Here is an example Export output:

The [Export] options present the question and answer information in an easily readable format, but to suit the limitations of Excel formatted text is displayed in an even more simplified format than the one used within RefTracker. In the following example you will see that most of the formatting has been removed.

Further hyperlinks in the Question and Answer text are presented as the full URL so that they can be copied to a web browser should they need to be viewed.

Further, the format shows the first 30 rows of text only. If you double click in a cell containing more than 30 lines, it will expand to show the rest of the data in that cell (as shown in the screen print below where the cursor is highlighted).

Exercise

If it is available for you to use, click on My journal entries report in the body of the staff Home page or in the Home menu list.

On initial display it will show in the mode, and for the time period, that you last used – such as Display by question for Yesterday.