The End of the Day When the Numbers Don't Add Up
Field service technicians who fill in timesheets retrospectively — end of week, or worse, end of month — are not filling in their timesheet. They are constructing a plausible narrative from incomplete memory, a text message from a dispatch system, and the vague recollection that Thursday was the day with the double overtime call at a grocery store out near the state line. The actual out time, the actual arrival time, the customer's terminal ID — these details are gone.
The financial consequence is not abstract. Reg, OT, and DT hours are billed at different rates. An NCR field technician who systematically underreports DT hours because the memory of a late-night POS failure becomes blurry by the following Tuesday is leaving real money behind, consistently, across every billing cycle. The mileage figure is the same problem: odometer start and end captured in the moment is exact. Reconstructed from a map estimate two days later is an educated guess that usually rounds down.
What Gets Logged Per Call
Each record in the Work Recap corresponds to a single service activity — one Activity number, one Task number, one customer, one terminal ID or store lane number. The granularity matters because an NCR service day often involves multiple calls at different locations or multiple activities at a single location that carry different task numbers and different billing codes.
Out Time is the moment you leave your home or starting location. Arrival is wheels-up at the customer site. Departure is when you close the call and leave. EOD Time is when you get home or reach end of day. This four-point time capture covers the billing arithmetic: time from Out to Arrival is drive time on call, time from Arrival to Departure is on-site service time, time from Departure to EOD is return drive. The division between Reg, OT, and DT hours applied across that total time is where the paycheck gets made or lost.
Odometer Start and End are the fields most technicians handle sloppily, and they're the ones that add up fastest. The mileage field captures the result. Over a 20-day work month with an average 60-mile round trip per call, imprecise odometer capture creates a reimbursement error that compounds across every pay period.
Hotel and Miscellaneous Expenses as First-Line Documentation
Hotel Expense and Misc EXP are text fields rather than currency fields — a practical choice for a mobile logging context where the exact dollar amount may be estimated at time of entry and reconciled against a receipt later.
The value of logging hotel expense per day rather than reconstructing it from a credit card statement at the end of a road assignment is straightforward: the credit card statement groups charges by posting date, not service date. A three-night assignment from Sunday through Tuesday may have charges posting Tuesday and Wednesday depending on the property. The daily record in the Work Recap ties the expense to the specific work day and the specific customer engagement, which is the link that matters for reimbursement approval and expense report accuracy.
Misc EXP captures parking fees at urban hospital sites where meter time runs while you're three floors up working a failed receipt printer during a high-volume lunch shift, tool expenditures, equipment rentals, and any other out-of-pocket cost with a business nexus to the specific call.
The Notes field is where the service narrative lives — what the fault was, what was replaced, what required escalation to a second dispatch, what the customer needs to know for follow-up. It's also the field that protects you when a customer disputes whether a call was completed or escalates a question about what was done on a specific date three months ago.