Reporting – Journal Entry Reporting

“Journal Entry Reporting” found in the menu list under Reporting in the main header bar, allows Supervisors and above to review and report on the individual time and cost records recorded by all their staff, or individual staff, in the selected time period. As opposed to the Data extract reports that report on the total time spent on each question, the data in this report allows analysis of the time spent on each question by staff during the selected time period only (whether the question was closed during that period or not, and irrespective of who closed the question) – it is an invaluable aid to measuring the contribution of each staff member to the total work done in a period.

There are two modes of operation of this function:

display by Journal entry – each individual action saved by each individual staff member in the order in which the time or cost was used, or ordered by staff member
display by Question – time and costs for that question totaled by each question

There is also an Export function that provides the information in this screen plus all other client contact information, in a spreadsheet. This might be helpful for further analysis. Note that System administrators can set up a regular export of similar time information, such as for use by a billing system, using the Data Export function – contact your Altarama support representative if you need to do this.

This functionality is very similar to the My journal entries available to individual staff in relation to their own time spent and costs incurred, but importantly, it allows all the journals (time spent and costs incurred) by all staff, or selected staff, or staff from a selected Location, to be reviewed for the selected period.

The system will remember the parameters you used for this report last time, and will present those results on initial display next time you use this report. This makes rerunning reports for different time periods very easy.

To use this report:

Options to show the records for “This month”, “Last month”, “Today” and “Yesterday” are provided, along with the Selected date option that allows any date range to be selected.
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 Total time used in the period you selected displays at the top left of the results table. This total time is for the records displayed in ALL pages of this report.
Only when reporting by Journal entry, you can select whether to include both time and costs, or just time, or just costs.
Only when reporting by Request/Question, separate columns will be provided for Time used (subs) and Costs (subs), if there have been any for the reported questions. These are time/costs incurred in relation to sub tasks or child questions that were related to the reported question and are required for billing the entire cost of that Primary request.
A “tiered” Location/Staff drop down box structure makes it easy to select just the time journals for a whole location, or for any individual staff member in your team. The list of staff includes your disabled staff and your general users as all of these staff could have recorded time during any historical period you might choose to analyse.
Sort order options are
– Location, then Staff member, then date/time, oldest to newest, however you can sort by any of the columns by clicking on the name of that column heading.
– Question number then date/time with the most recent transaction at the top.
Each column can be unsorted, sorted ascending, or sorted descending. Click the column heading to cycle through these options. If a column is contributing to the sort sequence it will be highlighted in a grey colour. If more than one column has been defined for the sort order, the sort precedence of columns is left to right.
The Question column also contains the same sort of Client contact detail summary information as is provided in the Open questions screens.
The number of records shown in a page can be controlled using the Page navigation controls at the bottom of the screen.

The columns that appear in this report can be amended, for example you might need a Practice group column added. Contact your Altarama support representative to have this change made (instructions are at the end of this help page).

Using Cost centres and Payments

If you are using Cost Centres and/or payments this journal entry reporting will include your Cost centre and/or payment information (To enable Cost centres enable that field in System>Data dictionary menu>System tables>Journal, and to enable payments enable the Payment type code table in System>Code tables menu>Payment type).
You can click on the Cost centre column heading to sort by Cost centre and you can use the Export function to take this information out to your Finance department.

Exporting to Excel

The Export function in this Journal entry reporting screen exports in a format specifically designed 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 (30 lines) until you double click in the cell. It also provides a question number hyperlink back to RefTracker (for making easy adjustments), and retains active hyperlinks in the question text.

Note that when opening this output in Excel the following message will display. It is normal. Click Yes and you will see your report.

Here’s an example Excel output. Notice that the question text and Item summary information appears in separate columns in this output. Further all of the fields from the Client table that contain data are also included to allow analysis of time spent by client, Department etc. (if your System administrator as not denied this Function).

The [Export] options present the question and answer information in the same Export (Excel spreadsheet) format used for RefTracker Data exports.

Further:
– hyperlinks in the Question and Answer text are presented in a number of ways – note that they are not clickable – to see any of these links you need to paste the URL from Excel into a browser window:

– URL’s for images are shown in a bold orange font (image)

– the text for hyperlinks show as purple text (anchor tag), and are followed by the URL surrounded by square brackets in grey (href tag)

– the format initially shows the first 30 lines of text only in each cell. If you click in a cell containing more than 30 rows, it will expand to show the rest of the data in that cell.

Changing the columns that display in the Journal entry reporting and My journal entries reports

So that the information in the “Question” display option for both My Journal entries and Journal entry reporting, can be adjusted to match the needs of your billing system, System administrators can change the columns appearing in this report by amending the appropriate file at System>Utilities>Administrations utilities>File upload/download. Go to the Config directory, Setting subdirectory, download the appropriate file, edit it, and then upload it again (or contact your Altarama support representative for assistance in making this change). We expect most customers who use this report will need the fields included to be changed.
The columns for the Journal entry reports by Question are defined in the following files found in your <reftrackerDomain>/config/settings directory:
JournalReport_10_2.xml for My Journal entries
JournalReport_30_2.xml for Journal record reporting
If you need to change one of these files we recommend that you make the same change to the other so that both the My journal entries and the Journal entry reporting screen continue to show the same information.
These files specify the columns that should be displayed, using XML, so don’t be shy in asking Altarama for help! Here is an example file.

The column widths should add up to 100 as they represent a % of the available space for the screen display.
You can specify a field for export only by setting the width to zero. Client contact fields are included in the export automatically.
Be sure to take a backup of the distribution version of this file, as, if you make a mistake in setting up this file it will result in an error displaying instead of the report.