Ability to Disable Time Tracking

[dschipfel]

For organizations that do not use time tracking, it would be beneficial to have the option to disable time entries globally.

Current situation

The time tracking functionality is visible throughout the ticketing workflow, even for organizations that do not track working times, billable hours, or effort spent on tickets.

Suggested solution

Introduce a system setting such as:

Enable Time Tracking: Yes / No

When disabled:

• Time entry fields are hidden from tickets
• Time tracking menus are removed from the interface
• Related statistics and reports are hidden
• Existing time entries remain in the database but are not displayed

Benefits

• Cleaner and less cluttered user interface
• Reduced complexity for agents
• Faster ticket processing
• Better adaptation to different organizational requirements

Not every organization uses time-based reporting or billing. For internal IT departments, the focus is often on ticket resolution, documentation, and service quality rather than tracking time spent on individual tasks.

Providing the ability to enable or disable time tracking would make FreeITSM more flexible and allow each organization to tailor the system to its own workflow and processes.

[edmozley]

Hi @dschipfel

Built and in main. Your reasoning is what settled the design - "the focus is often on ticket resolution, documentation, and service quality rather than tracking time spent on individual tasks" is a real position, and the panel sitting there regardless was quietly arguing with it.

It ended up slightly different from the proposal in two ways, both of which I think are improvements.

Two switches, not one

Tickets → Settings → Time tracking has two:

Switch	What it does
Record time on tickets	Shows the time panel in the ticket view, and lets people add entries
Serve time entries over the REST API	Whether /api/v1/tickets/{id}/time-entries still answers

Hiding the panel tidies your screens. Closing the API can break something somebody built against it - a billing export, a reporting job, an integration nobody mentioned when they set it up. Those are different decisions affecting different people, so you get to make them separately.

If you are switching time tracking off simply because your team does not use it, leave the API switch alone.

It can be set per company

Each switch has an install-wide default, and any company can be given its own answer or left to follow it. Which switch applies to a ticket is decided by the company that ticket belongs to.

That is for anyone running FreeITSM for more than one client - bill one for time and not another. On a single-company installation there is no company section at all, just the two switches, which is what you actually asked for.

"Follow the default" is deliberately a third option rather than a checkbox, so a company you have given an answer to can be handed back to the default later.

Your "preserve existing data" point

Taken literally. Neither switch deletes anything. Entries already recorded stay exactly where they are and come back untouched the moment you switch it on again. Try it for a month and change your mind, and nothing has been lost.

On the rest of the proposal

You mentioned removing time tracking menus and concealing related statistics and reports. Worth saying plainly: those do not exist. Time in FreeITSM is a panel on a ticket and two endpoints behind it - there is no timesheet screen, no time report and no dashboard widget. So there was less to hide than your write-up assumed, which is why this landed in Tickets settings rather than System: every surface it has is a ticket surface.

Two details you may care about:

• A stale tab cannot still file time. Hiding a panel is not the same as turning a feature off, so the save endpoint refuses too - if somebody had a ticket open when you flipped the switch, their next entry is declined rather than quietly accepted into a disabled feature.
• The API refuses rather than returning an empty list. An empty list would say "this ticket has no time recorded", which is a different and untrue statement. It answers 404 with a message naming the reason, so a caller can tell "off" from "none".

Documentation

• Time tracking - the user guide
• Time tracking - Developer Guide - how the per-company settings layer works, and how to reuse it

Thanks for the suggestion - and if two switches turns out to be one more than anybody wants, say so and I will happily hear it.