One entry per visit
Every contact moment in CRM can get an entry: hours worked, travel time, mileage and expenses, together with a type of hour (intake, advice, reporting, travel time, meeting or other) and a note on the expenses. One entry per visit, so you don’t have to puzzle out afterwards which line belongs to which conversation.
Time is stored in minutes, not decimal hours. A 1-hour-20 conversation is 80 minutes, not 1.333…; once you add up a month’s worth of lines, that difference becomes clearly visible against what was actually entered. Entering time as a decimal is still allowed.
Approval as a hard step
An entry moves from draft to submitted and then to approved or rejected. Once a line is submitted, it’s locked: it can no longer be changed, because otherwise an approval would say nothing about what’s actually in it now. A rejected line goes back to draft with a reason — revise and resubmit. Approving is done by an administrator or owner of the environment, and never for their own entries. Approving and rejecting are logged, including who did it and when.
Engagements linked to the customer record
An engagement is a thin case file attached to a contact: a name, the scheme it falls under, the responsible consultant and a status (active or archived). You attach activities to it, so the visits, the reports and the hours of a guidance engagement stay together instead of being spread across the timeline.
Write-up of the conversation
If you record a conversation, the write-up appears as a summary on the activity. If consultant mode is switched on, CRM’s analysis also asks for three extra things: the issues your conversation partner raised, the advice you gave, and the points that still need to be looked into. You get that as a pre-filled form — checking and saving it is up to you.
Export by period
Choose a start and end date and download a CSV with the entries from that period: by default only the approved lines, everything if you want. The period looks at the date of the visit, not when the line was submitted, and the file opens in Excel without any hassle (semicolon, decimal comma). What you do with the file afterwards — importing it into payroll processing or bookkeeping — is outside CRM’s scope.
Turning it on per environment
The consultant features are off by default. An administrator switches them on in the CRM settings; that change is logged. Without that switch, CRM stays exactly what it was, with no extra fields on the customer record.