Measure time spent on support tickets

Standard reports show how fast support tickets get answered and closed, but they don’t show how much time actually went into one behind the scenes. A ticket that sits untouched for 2 days but takes 45 minutes of focused work to resolve looks identical, on a response-time chart, to a simple 5-minute fix. You can now track time spent on tickets with a start/stop timer, manual entries, and billable/total time metrics.

How is time spent measured?

Our new timer doesn’t have a separate “Pause” button. There’s only a single Stop and save action. That’s a deliberate choice, made to stop the timer being left running over a coffee break and quietly ticking away until lunchtime. The timer is also careful about idle time:

• It pauses automatically when you switch to a different browser tab.
• It stops counting when your computer goes to sleep.
• It never auto-resumes a timer that’s been left running and gone stale. It only offers you the choice to save the time or discard it.
• It only lets one ticket run at a time. Starting a timer on a different ticket asks you to confirm the handoff.

The measured duration is always just a suggestion, and it always requires human confirmation before it’s saved.

Reporting time spent

When you’d rather not use the timer, you can add time directly by hand. Enter hours and minutes, use the quick +15, +30, or +60 minute chips, and set the date, description, and whether it’s billable. These totals, gathered per ticket, show up in 2 new filterable, exportable columns in your ticket list: Billable time and Total time.

Billing details and setup

This feature includes flexibility that’s genuinely useful in day-to-day operations. For example, you can still add time to closed tickets for end-of-month corrections, and when tickets are merged, existing time entries move to the surviving ticket instead of being lost.

To start using the feature, turn on this setting, which is off by default:

Settings → Customer Service → Tickets → General → Time spent

From this menu, you can manage the default billability, whether the timer appears in the interface, and who has permission to edit or delete time entries.

To see which plans include time tracking, check our pricing page, and for everything else a ticket can do, browse our feature list.

To get a clearer picture of how your team spends its time, which customer group would you test this feature on first?