Time and materials administration

Admin access required

You must be logged in as an administrator to enable/disable time and materials tracking and manage materials types.

SortScape can also help you track employee time spent and materials used on a visit so that you know how much to invoice customers.

The materials catalog is for items your team can add to visits when recording what was used on a job. It is not a business purchase or expense tracker for overall company costs such as fuel cards, equipment buys, insurance, or subscriptions. Keep those in your accounting software if you need them for tax or bookkeeping.

Time and materials tracking is enabled by default. To enable or disable time and materials tracking, open Settings → Time & materials → Settings.

On this screen you can:

• Enable or disable time and materials tracking for your SortScape site
• Manage the catalog of materials that your employees can enter when listing materials used visits.
• Edit other settings like whether to allow non-administrators to see material prices.

What changes when tracking is disabled

When time and materials tracking is off:

• The Invoice items section is hidden on the visit show page (view mode).
• You cannot add one-off line items from the visit while viewing it.
• Time spent and the visit timer are hidden on the visit page.
• Invoice items may still appear when you Edit a visit.

If you rely on adding one-off charges from the schedule without editing the repeating series, keep time and materials tracking enabled. See One-off charges on a single visit.

SortScape shows a confirmation when you disable tracking so you know these features will be removed from the visit page.

Permissions and privacy on material prices

Material prices may be information that you do not want to share with employees. Therefore, Allow non-administrators to see material prices is disabled by default. Open Settings → Time & materials → Settings, then enable this setting to make all material prices visible to users with the employee and contractor roles.

There may be variable job costs, like parking fees or miscellaneous charges on a visit, that employees incur while working. In those cases you may want non-administrators to be able to enter the price on particular items. Open Settings → Time & materials → Items catalogue, then enable Allow non-admins to view and edit price on visits? on the relevant items.

Documentation for end users

See the end user documentation for how to enter time and materials for customer visits.