Introduction
In previous articles we shed some light on how we manage our business in general and how we manage our schedule using our lovely Airtable. This article is about how we manage our day to day work on tickets and customer’s requests.
The goal
Our service approach is unique, it is a productized service where we work on the customer’s tasks using our own “per time” effort distribution system.
From the management perspective, therefore, we need to know who, when and how long has each team member been working on a single ticket for a customer. And this is where Airtable helps us a lot.
Ultimate solution?
This image above shows what our timesheet tab looks like. It contains the following fields (I’ve also indicated the field type):
- Task (Multiple lines text field) – is a brief description of what has been done for a customer within this particular session
- Customer (Lookup field tied to “Customers” table) – is self-explanatory, this is the name of the person whom we were working for
- Team Member (Lookup field tied to “Team” table) – same like above but who was the one who worked on this task
- Ticket # (Number field) – is a ticket number in our helpdesk, FreshDesk.
- Start Time (Date field with hours) – it is when we started to work on a ticket
- End Time (Date field with hours)- it is when we finished our work on a ticket
- Total time (Duration field) – it is a time spent on a ticket (And here we have some trick, even looking on fact that we can use a formula here to calculate this field automatically we didn’t do that. It is just a usual number field that you should fill up yourself. “What the hell?!” did you say. Well, we believe that doing simple math on a constant basis keeps your brain in good condition!)
- Ticket URL (Formula field) – it is a formula that makes the number of the ticket from “#” field to be a direct link for easy access
Point of view
It is not enough just to input the data you need to the system, you also need to render it in the way you need it.
But we have a views feature in Airtable. You might already notice that this is the magic wand that makes utmost things for us here in MemberFix. For example, this is how my personal view looks like:
As you may see it is just a master view filtered by Team member field using Where “X” Contains “Y” conditions:
We are using various conditions for our reporting and there is no complete solution so you just go for the ones you need for your particular goals. Another great thing is that you can create a shareable link for any view where conditions and field visibility will be preset by you:
This feature allows us to provide such a link to our customer only once in the form of a shared private view and after that, they are able to view the report of the work done for them anytime, and filter / group the results as they see fit.
In essence, we’ve automated reporting. 🙂
On this positive mood, I’d like to finish for now, but there will more to come! Stay Tuned!
