Utilizing the Tech Hours Report

The Tech Hours report is an excellent way to view the hours and/or times by technician for any given date range. It summarizes all of the information from the schedule tab of your dispatches, calculates hours and can even provide statistics for each tech based upon the dispatch times.

Payroll Purposes

One very common use for this report is for payroll purposes. It can be printed for the payroll period and will total both the traveling time and the working time for each technician. Detail times are also provided so you can check for accuracy as well.

When previewing the report on screen you can use ESC’s drill down feature to recall any dispatch. Simply hold your mouse over the dispatch number. Notice how the mouse pointer changes to a pointing hand when you do this. Click the dispatch number to recall that dispatch where you can make adjustments to times or view more dispatch detail.

If you have ESC set to integrate with QuickBooks, PeachTree or ESC Accounting, the dispatch hours can be posted to their payroll module for payroll processing. The Tech Hours Report is the perfect report to review the information to be posted. If you outsource your payroll processing, this report can also be exported to Excel, PDF, XML or as tab delimited ASCII file.

Technician Statistics

By changing the Type field to ‘With Stats’ on the report’s filter window, additional technician statistics can be displayed as well. Average response time, travel time, time to complete in addition to the dispatch count are provided for each day as well as calculated for the entire date range of the report. This can be helpful information in evaluating the promptness and productivity of your individual technicians.

Additional Creative Benefits

By adding and utilizing different filters, this report can help you see the hours expended for a variety of situations. These include the following:

How many man hours for customer xx this year?

Filter	From	To
Dispatch Date	1/1/2012	12/31/2012
Customer Num	0004266

How many hours did a tech request off this year?

Some companies may create ‘time off’ dispatches as described in a previous newsletter. If you have separate customer dispatches for things such ‘Shop Time’ they can be consolidated in this way as well.

Filter	From	To
Dispatch Date	1/1/2012	12/31/2012
Technician	0015
Customer Num	0004267

How many hours were on dispatches that were not invoiced at all? Not even on a zero priced invoice?

Filter	From	To
Dispatch Date	Any	Any
Invoiced Flag	No

Filters could even be used to identify dispatches in a specific zone or with a certain priority. The Tech Hours Report is a very powerful report and may be able to provide more insights than might be apparent at first glance. It is the perfect go-to report when needing to evaluate hours, times or even a count of your technician’s dispatches.

Written by Shelley White
Featured in July 2012 Newsletter