If your agents need to bill users based on the support they provide, you can enable the time log and ticket billing features.

The time log lets agents record the amount of time they spend on a ticket, while ticket billing lets them specify an amount of money to charge for support. {This is not to be confused with the Billing & Licensing interface where you pay for your Deskpro license, accessible through the icon at the lower left).

By default, each time or charge recorded has a comment field which enables the agent to enter an optional comment.

You can enable time logging and billing separately. Depending on which option is enabled, tickets will have a Billing tab, a Time Log tab or a combined Billing & Time Log tab.

Go to Tickets > Time Log & Billing to change the settings.

The Time Log sections lets you enable the time log, and choose whether to Automatically start timer as soon as the ticket is opened by an agent.

Note that the agent still has to press the Add Charge button to save the elapsed time.

The Ticket Billing section lets you enable or disable monetary billing, and specify the currency.

The agent permission Can modify billing and time log records controls whether the agent can edit previously entered charges. An agent with this permission can also enter amounts of time directly, rather than running the timer.

Custom billing fields

You can customize the fields for each time or billing charge in Tickets > Time Log & Billing > Fields.

You can also edit settings for the default comment field; for example, if you want to make leaving a comment compulsory.

Adding custom billing fields works in the same way as  Ticket Fields, except that

• billing fields can never be visible to users
• the Display and Hidden field types are not available for billing

The same custom fields are used for both monetary billing and time log entries.

The Can modify billing and time log records enables an agent to edit the values of custom billing fields, as well as the charges.

Billing users

Deskpro only records times and charges for agents - users are not automatically notified, and you will need to bill users outside of Deskpro.

To facilitate billing, you can use the Reports interface to see simple summaries of all charges; note that you can generate reports by organization as well as by user.

Agents can also see the history of charges for a user and organization from profiles in CRM.

If you need more in-depth billing information, you can use the custom reports function from the Report Builder to retrieve charge information. See the article:  Generating custom reports on ticket billing or time charges

Charges in email notifications

If you want to include a list of charges on a ticket in user email notifications, you can do so by editing the relevant email notification templates in Admin > Tickets > Email Templates.

Here’s an example to display a list of all time charges, with comments and which agent made the charge:

{% if ticket.charges %}
Chargeable time for this ticket:<br /><br />
{% endif %}
{% for charge in ticket.charges %}
time: {{ relative_time(charge.charge_time) }} <br />
comment: {{ charge.comment }} <br />
agent: {{ charge.person.display_name }} <br /><br />
{% endfor %}
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