Friday afternoon, reconstructing the week
The service manager's Friday message goes out again: please get your time in. Engineers open the PSA and try to remember what they did on Tuesday. The two-hour remote session on a server shows as fifteen minutes because that was when they updated the ticket. The phone call that fixed a printer never had a ticket. The site visit is logged, the travel is not.
The result is that billing uses whatever made it in, utilisation reports undercount, and per-client effort figures are low for the clients that phone rather than email.
Why engineers do not log time
Engineers are not being lazy. Time logging is a separate task from the work itself, and the PSA's time entry screens are built for accuracy, not speed.
- Logging interrupts the flow of fixing things.
- Phone calls and quick chats never become tickets.
- Remote sessions are timed by the remote tool, not the PSA.
- Friday reconstruction relies on memory, which undercounts.
- Engineers see no benefit from logging accurately.
Some PSAs encourage logging on ticket close, which works for short tickets and fails for long ones. A problem worked on across three days, with calls and remote sessions in between, ends up as one entry typed at the end, usually shorter than the real effort.
What missing time costs
| Missing time | Effect |
|---|---|
| Billable work not logged | Revenue lost on time-and-materials and project work |
| Managed effort under-recorded | Client effort figures too low at renewal |
| Travel not logged | Site visits look cheaper than they are |
| Friday reconstruction | Engineers lose an hour a week to guesswork |
| Poor data | Every report built on time entries is wrong |
How we capture time from what engineers already do
- Activity signals pulled from tools engineers already use: PSA ticket updates, remote session logs from your RMM or remote access tool, phone system call records, and calendar events in Microsoft 365.
- Matching of each activity to a client and, where possible, a ticket, using phone numbers, device names and email addresses.
- Suggested time entries for the day, grouped and pre-filled, with the ticket and work type proposed.
- A short end-of-day review where the engineer confirms, edits or dismisses each suggestion, and creates a ticket for untracked calls with one click.
- A gap view for the service manager showing available hours not covered by entries, per engineer and day, without naming anyone publicly.
- Entries written back to the PSA through its API once confirmed, so billing and reporting use the same data.
Engineers stay in control. Nothing is logged without them confirming it, and dismissed suggestions are not held against them.
What the end of a day looks like
At five o'clock, the engineer opens the review. It shows the two-hour remote session on the server, matched to the ticket; three phone calls, two matched to tickets and one from a client number with no ticket; and a calendar entry for a site visit with travel time. They confirm the session, confirm the matched calls, click to create a ticket for the third, and adjust the travel. It takes a few minutes.
Friday nagging stops. Billing picks up time that used to be lost. Client effort figures reflect phone support, not just email tickets. And the service manager can see gaps as they appear, rather than at month end.
Engineers get something back too: the evidence of how much they actually do, which matters when workload is discussed.
Project engineers benefit in a slightly different way. Their days are spent on long remote sessions and meetings rather than many small tickets, and the review turns a calendar full of project meetings and a remote session log into project time entries against the right phase. The project manager sees real progress against the estimate each week, instead of a burst of entries at the end of the month that makes the project look fine until suddenly it does not.
Is missing time a problem at your MSP?
- You send a weekly reminder to log time.
- Time entries are made days after the work.
- Phone support rarely appears in time entries.
- Remote session times and logged times disagree.
- Client effort reports feel too low.