Managing Activities | Blog

Virtual TimeClock Support Blog

Managing Activities

August 2, 2014

One of the popular advanced features of Virtual TimeClock is the ability to track time against different activities. You can define activities in any way that makes the most sense for the workflow of your business. We often see activities used to track time against tasks, projects, office locations, customers, and jobs. Old activities can be made inactive so they no longer appear in the current selection list when starting work, but they will always appear in the master list in Configure Activities. An activity can't be deleted if it has ever been used to track historic time punches. Some activities get used over and over again, others are used just once. It all depends on the nature of your business.

If your activity list has gotten difficult to sort through because activities get used just a few times before making them inactive, here's an idea that may make it easier to manage the main activity list in Configure Activities. The secret is to control how activities are sorted within the list. Normally, numeric activity names are at the top of the list, followed by alphabetic ones. We've seen some customers add a "z" to the front of inactive activities so they appear at the end of the list (of course, this could be confusing if you have real activity names that begin with "z"). Something that works well is to use the "|" symbol (sometimes called the vertical bar or pipe) at the beginning of inactive activity names. This will sort them to the bottom of your activity list so active activities are always grouped at the top.