Intelligence Reports with Your Agent

Once your Agent is connected to AbleTime, it can build you an intelligence report for any period you name: a page of Report Cards, with a link and a six-character code that let anyone you share them with open it without signing in. In this guide you check what you need first, ask for the overview, read what the Agent tells you and what the page shows, then go deeper by asking for the next Report Cards by name or code, narrow the report to people or to how the hours were written, and deal with a Report Card that is flagged.

What you need first

Reports reach your Agent through a connection of their own, separate from the one it uses to record time and manage tasks. Agent access has to be on for your organization, and you need a personal access key of your own, created with Create access key on the API Access tab of My Profile. Every connection runs on that key, including one you approve in your browser. Then add Reports to your host as another server at https://track.abletime.com/api/public/v2/mcp/reports. On a host that connects through the Connect to AbleTime page in your browser, approve the Reports connection when it asks; each connection is approved on its own, so approving the one for your time does not approve this one. On a host that takes a key, give it your personal access key. Every step is on Connecting Your Agent. If your Agent can track your time but says it has no way to read reports, the Reports connection is what is missing.

Your role decides what a report covers. An owner or admin gets every active project in the organization, money included. A manager gets the projects they are a member of, plus any project open to all personnel, without money; see What a manager gets, below. Users and account managers cannot ask for intelligence reports.

Ask for the overview

A period is all the Agent needs. "September so far", "last week", "1 to 15 August": any of those will do, and the Agent works out the dates. Name a project and the report covers that project only; name none and it covers every project you can report on.

When you do not yet know what you are looking for, ask for the period and name no Report Card. You get every Report Card except the ones about how the hours were written (see What the agents did), led by At a glance (AT-001): the hours logged and where they went, the billable share, overhead, backlog and return on effort, each with its daily trend. It makes a long page, which is the point of an overview: you scan it for what needs a closer look. Ask for At a glance by name when you want only that one.

You:    Give me September so far for Atlas.

Agent:  Before you open it: one billable category on Atlas has no rate, so
        6:30 of billable hours aren't priced and are left out of the
        billable value. The report names the category.
        Here's your intelligence report for Atlas, 1–27 September, covering
        everyone on the project. It opens with At a glance (AT-001),
        followed by the other Report Cards. The link works until 11 October.
        Link: (report link with its code)

What the Agent tells you

First come the coverage notes: what the report cannot account for because something has not been set, such as a rate, a cost, a capacity, an estimate or a budget, with how many categories, people, tasks or projects are affected and, where possible, the hours. Read them before the Report Cards, because they qualify what follows. The Agent hears about every gap across the projects in the report, so it can mention one that the page itself does not show.

Then comes the link with its code, when the link expires, and what the report covers: the dates, the projects, the people, and whether money is included. If you want the numbers rather than the picture, ask: the Agent can read them back to you, and use them to answer a question the Report Cards were not built for.

Open the link

Open the link in any browser. The link your Agent gives you carries its code, so it opens straight onto the intelligence report, and you can pass it to a client or a colleague who has no AbleTime account. To keep the link and the code apart, send the link without the part from ?key= onward and give the code separately. Whoever opens it sees a short page headed This report is behind a code with six boxes; they type or paste the code and click View report. With the wrong code, or once the link has expired, the page says only that the report was not found.

Read the page

At the top, under the AbleTime wordmark and the words Intelligence report, is a title taken from the first Report Card, then the date range with its count of days and working days, and when the report was created. Below that are the projects the report covers and the people: "all members of the projects" unless you named some.

If a missing setting affects any Report Card on the page, a Warning box sits between the top of the page and the first Report Card, so a reader who never spoke to your Agent sees it first. It names each gap once: a billable category with no rate and the billable hours left unpriced, tasks with hours but no estimate, or a project with no budget. It carries only the gaps that touch the Report Cards on the page, so it can say less than the Agent did.

Then come the Report Cards, one after another in the order you asked for them. Each is headed with its name, its code on the right, and a sentence saying what it shows. Inside each Report Card, the line under its title gives the range and the number of projects, and many carry short footnotes saying what a marked number includes. Ask for a range that runs past today, for example, and At a glance notes that its hours run only to the day the report was made.

Under every Report Card are Copy link, which copies the page's address with its code, and Print, which opens your browser's print dialog for the whole page, not only that Report Card. Below them, info opens an explanation of the Report Card under five headings: what it measures, how each number is worked out, how to read its labels, legend and axes, the data it draws on, and its caveats. It is written for someone checking the arithmetic, so read the sentence that heads the Report Card first, and open info when a number surprises you. The spec fold next to it holds the Report Card's settings as technical data.

A Report Card with nothing to draw can be left off the page. Scheduled load by person (AT-501) and Tasks needing attention (AT-601), for instance, are read from the day the report is made, so they appear only when the range includes that day; a report on last month has neither.

Go deeper

The page does not link onward; it shows what you asked for and stops. Going deeper means asking your Agent again, by the Report Card's name or its code. "Hours by project" and "AT-102" ask for the same thing, but the code is the surer way, since several names start alike. Name one Report Card and you get that one; name several and they appear in the order you named them. Each request gives you a new intelligence report with its own link.

Apart from At a glance and Project card, every Report Card belongs to a group. Effort says where the hours went; Delivery sets finished work against its estimates; Flow shows how tasks moved and at what pace; Planning puts projects, epics and cycles against their estimates; Load sets people's hours against their capacity; Attention shows what is late, every task in the range, and who logged nothing; Money shows value, invoicing and budgets; Origin shows how the hours were written.

Let the overview suggest the next question. If overhead looks high, ask for Hours by person (AT-103), which gives each person's hours with the share that was overhead. If finished work ran over its estimates, ask for Finished work by project: estimate against actual (AT-205), then Finished work by person: estimate against actual (AT-204) to see whose tasks ran over. If the pace looks uneven, Pace (AT-304) draws velocity, momentum and overhead day by day. Your Agent can list every Report Card for you.

You:    Hours by person for 14 to 20 September, and AT-106 alongside it.

Agent:  Here are Hours by person (AT-103) and Hours by person, by project
        (AT-106) for 14–20 September, across all your projects. No gaps
        to flag this time.
        Link: (report link with its code)

You:    Who logged the most, and how much of it was overhead?

Agent:  Maya logged the most: 31:45, of which 2:00 was overhead. Tom is
        next at 28:10, with 0:30 of overhead, then Priya at 19:20, all of
        it on tasks.

Narrow to people

Name people and the report counts only the hours they logged: "Maya and Tom only" is enough. The top of the page names them in place of "all members of the projects", and each Report Card's range line adds how many people it covers.

Some Report Cards cannot be split by person: the ones that set hours against estimates, because an estimate belongs to the whole task, and the budget ones, because a budget belongs to the whole project. They show a short line saying so, or are left off. Where another Report Card shows accuracy, the accuracy is left out for the same reason. Ask again without naming people to see them.

What the agents did

The Origin Report Cards, AT-801 to AT-808, split the hours and tasks by how each entry was written: written in the app, written through the API, or a draft accepted by an agent. Work by agents (AT-801) is the headline: the share of hours that came in as drafts accepted by an agent, its trend day by day, and the tasks agents worked on. The others break the split down by day, project, person, kind of work, byline and task, and Finished tasks by how they were opened (AT-808) counts finished tasks by how each one was opened. These Report Cards are left out of the overview, so name one to see them. Naming any of them brings in all three origins, so no hours are dropped.

Hours count as an agent's only when an agent accepted the draft. A draft your Agent writes and you accept in the app counts as written in the app. Whether your Agent may accept its own drafts is the Agent may commit (accept) my time entries setting described on Time / Task Manager. If you run an Agent with an account of its own, as on Agents in Your Workflow, these Report Cards are where its share of the work shows up.

You:    How much of August was done by agents across my projects?

Agent:  Across your three projects, 1–31 August, 38:20 of the 212:40
        logged, 18%, came in as drafts accepted by an agent, on 9 tasks.
        The link below opens Work by agents (AT-801), with the trend day
        by day.
        Link: (report link with its code)

You:    And what was that worth?

Agent:  I can't put a value on it. As a manager, you see the hours on your
        own projects, but not the money.

You can also ask for hours written one way only, such as "only what agents wrote in August". The top of the page then adds an Origins row naming what was kept, and most Report Cards count only those hours, with their range line ending "entries written via agent only". Hours added up task by task are the exception: the Report Cards that set finished work or projects against their estimates, and those that count or list tasks, such as Tasks touching the range (AT-602), still count every entry, though some show the same words on their range line. The budget Report Cards are not drawn. To see an agent's share task by task, ask for Hours by task, by origin (AT-807).

What a manager gets

A manager gets no Money Report Cards, and the money inside other Report Cards is left out too: At a glance, for one, shows the billable share and hours without their value. The Agent treats a missing value as the edge of what you may see, and never estimates it.

When a Report Card is flagged

A note in the Warning box is not a fault in the report. It says what could not be priced or measured because something is not set, and names what to set: a rate on a billable category (see Categories), an estimate on a task (see Tasks), or a budget on a project (see Managing Projects). Set the one the note names, then ask your Agent for the report again. A rate applies to hours logged from then on, so billable hours logged before you set it can stay unpriced, and the note goes on counting them.

The Agent can also mention a missing cost on a category or a missing capacity on a person. The page has no note for those, but they matter to the budget and load Report Cards.

You are done when you have a link you can send and the code to go with it, the Agent has told you what the Report Cards leave out, and the page reads the way you expected. Every Report Card, by group and code, with what each one shows, is on Intelligence Reports. The same Report Cards can be assembled and shared from the browser, without an Agent, on Custom Reports. Habits for working alongside your Agent are on Tips.