Twelve Hours on the Road, Four Hours on the Bench, and a Missing Per Diem Receipt
For a field service technician, the "workday" is a fiction. Your day starts when you pull out of the driveway at 5 AM and ends when you’re finishing the final "Task description" in a hotel room 300 miles away. Most corporate timesheets are built for the 9-to-5 office worker; they don't account for the dead miles, the store numbers that don't match the dispatch, or the "Per diem" that gets lost in the laundry. When your payroll department asks why you logged 16 hours on a Tuesday, you need more than a memory—you need a granular, time-stamped breakdown of every "Travel hour".
This template is a technician’s defense against administrative friction.
Travel Hours vs. Hours Worked: The Margin Killers
The separation of "Hours worked" and "Travel hours" is the most critical distinction in this database. For many contractors, travel is billed at a different rate than technical labor. If you’re lump-summing your day into a single "hours" bucket, you’re either overcharging the client or undercutting your own labor margin.
By logging the "Start time" and "End time" for the technical work separately from the travel, you provide a transparent audit trail for the "Job#/ref#". When the client’s accounts-payable department flags a high-invoice "Store number", you can point to the three hours of windshield time required to reach a remote location vs. the actual four hours of bench work performed. It moves the conversation from a dispute over hours to a factual review of logistics.
The Store Number and the Task Description
The "Store number" field is the unique identifier that ties the time log to the physical asset. In retail maintenance or nationwide franchise service, a "Job#/ref#" might be duplicated across multiple locations, but the Store Number is absolute. It prevents the nightmare of billing the wrong franchise owner for a repair performed at a different site.
The "Task description" field is where the technical reality is captured. "Fixed the router" is useless. "Replaced damaged Cat6 cable in Rack 4 and verified DHCP handshake" is a professional record. This field ensures that when the next tech arrives at the same Store Number six months from now, they see the "Note" about the intermittent power issue you found but didn't have the parts to fix that day.
Per Diem and the Financial Loop
The "Per diem" boolean is a simple toggle with significant financial implications. For field contractors, per diem is often a non-taxable reimbursement that requires strict daily logging. By toggling this field at the "End time" of each day, you’re building your monthly expense report in real-time.
Instead of sitting in your truck on Friday afternoon trying to remember if you stayed overnight on Tuesday or Wednesday, the data is already locked to the "Date". You’re not just tracking time; you’re managing your personal cash flow and ensuring that every billable minute—whether it was spent behind the wheel or behind a server rack—is accounted for and justified.