Why the first and last clock times aren’t enough
Arriving at a property at 08:30 and leaving at 11:15 doesn’t automatically mean you spent two hours and 45 minutes doing chargeable plumbing work.
You may have diagnosed the fault, waited for access to a stopcock, collected a fitting, spoken to another customer or taken a break. Some of that may be chargeable under your terms; some may not. The point is to record what actually happened first, then decide how your job pricing or billing arrangements treat each activity.
That distinction is especially important when a small repair turns into a second visit. Without a job-level record, the labour can end up split across scraps of paper, text messages and memory.
Keep one record per customer and job
You don’t need a complicated field-service system to organise time.
For example:
- Customer: Mrs Evans
- Job: Kitchen tap replacement
- Visit 1: Diagnose leak and identify fitting
- Visit 2: Replace tap, test for leaks and tidy work area
The customer stays the same, and both visits belong to the same job. Give each period of work a short description so you can understand the record later.
If Mrs Evans asks you to service a boiler the following month, create another job. That keeps different pieces of work separate without duplicating the customer.
Worked example: a repair over two visits
Suppose the first callout goes like this:
| Time | Activity | Active labour recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30–09:10 | Diagnose leak and remove old fitting | 40 min |
| 09:10–09:35 | Waiting for replacement part | 0 min |
| 09:35–10:20 | Fit temporary connection and make safe | 45 min |
| Visit 1 labour | 1 h 25 min |
Two days later you return:
| Time | Activity | Active labour recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 13:00–13:50 | Fit replacement tap | 50 min |
| 13:50–14:10 | Test and tidy | 20 min |
| Visit 2 labour | 1 h 10 min |
Across the two visits, you recorded 2 hours 35 minutes of active labour (85 + 70 = 155 minutes).
The 25-minute wait in the first visit is not counted as active labour in this example. That doesn’t make a rule about what plumbers can charge: some work arrangements treat waiting, travel, callout minimums or sourcing parts differently. Keep those decisions separate from the underlying time record and follow your agreed terms.
Pause for interruptions, then resume the right job
For practical time tracking, the distinction between Pause and Finish matters.
Pause when you’re temporarily leaving the task but expect to return, such as when waiting for access or taking a break. Resume when you restart the work.
Finish when that session is complete. A return visit can then be another session under the same job, allowing the job total to include both visits.
If a different customer calls while you’re working, pause the current session and record the new work separately if you need an accurate account of both. Don’t leave the first job running during the call.
A timer doesn’t decide what constitutes chargeable labour. It helps you preserve accurate durations so you can apply your own rules afterwards.
When to add or correct time manually
Nobody remembers every tap on a busy day. The answer is to correct the record promptly, not accept a duration you know is wrong.
If you start work at 08:30 but forget to start the timer until 08:42, add the missing twelve minutes using a manual entry or correction, provided you’re confident of the times.
If you leave a timer running through a 25-minute wait, adjust the recorded intervals to exclude that period.
For corrections, ask yourself:
- When did the work genuinely start?
- When did it stop?
- Was there a pause or another job in between?
- Am I accidentally recording the same minutes twice?
Don’t reconstruct exact times from guesswork if you don’t know them. A note stating your best estimate is more defensible than false precision.
A simple end-of-job checklist
Before leaving the site or closing the job for the day, check:
- Correct customer and job: Is this the repair you actually worked on?
- Active labour: Have breaks or unrelated calls been excluded?
- Return visits: Are earlier and later sessions grouped together?
- Description: Does each entry say what was done?
- Long-running timer: Was the timer left running accidentally?
- Next step: Is the job genuinely finished, or will you return?
If you keep paper job sheets or prepare invoices in separate software, export or copy your recorded hours into that system. Time records, materials, travel, tax and invoice totals are different pieces of information and shouldn’t be confused.
Recording the job in TapSpan
TapSpan lets you start a timer, pause it when work stops, resume it when you return and record additional sessions under the same customer and job. You can correct recorded time and review the total before exporting finished sessions to CSV.
It doesn’t provide GPS tracking, materials management, callout scheduling or invoices. The focus is keeping a straightforward, retrievable record of the labour time you spent.