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Many Bento users want to create a time-recording system of some type. This may be for something such as billing customers, tracking hours contributed by volunteers or monitoring employees. Although these are all slightly different the core functionality is the same and this article will explore some of the various options available.

The simplest form of time tracking is to simply keep a list of dates and the hours worked. This solution would use two fields, one a Date field and one a Number field:

The next step up from this is to use start and end times to calculate the number of hours worked:

Here the start and end times are Time fields and the Duration is a Calculation field. Showing the Time fields as hours, minutes and seconds is useful because Bento will assign the current seconds to a time if you do not explicitly set them yourself. For example, if the current time is 13:15:45 and you enter a time as 09:00 because you are only displaying hours and minutes Bento will actually store 09:00:45 which may cause problems with rounding. Therefore it is safest to have Time fields use the Medium display format rather than the Short one.

The Duration formula is:

The End Time - Start Time part is fairly self-explanatory and the division of the result by (60 * 60) is necessary because Bento returns the results of date and time calculations in seconds. Since the result of the calculation should be in hours the seconds need to be converted to hours which is done by dividing them by 3,600 or 60 * 60. Remember to set the results of the Calculation field to be displayed as a Number and with one or two decimal places depending upon how much detail you want to see.

Obviously, if the time recording system is being used to allocate hours to projects or clients additional fields may be needed to store the name of the project and/or the name of the client. Similarly if multiple employees or volunteers are being tracked then a field to store the employee or volunteer names would be necessary.

A more advanced time recording system would perhaps tie in with other Libraries. For example, rather than repeating employee or volunteer names it may be a good idea to use the Address Book or a dedicated Library to store the person’s details and then use a Related Records List to store the time-based details:

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For more information about Related Records List please see our guide.

However, because Bento’s related record capabilities are designed to be simple there is an inherent lack of power and flexibility in them and so it may be better to either stick with a one-Library solution or live with some duplicate data and store the person’s name in the main time recording Library. This will allow for the creation of Smart Collections to filter and total records by person and date range which may be useful for calculating weekly, monthly, etc. totals.

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