Alternatives to clocking in/out for reporting time

[Russell Adams]

I make extensive use of timestamps for billing (timesheet)
purposes. I'm looking to automate this more, and I find the existing
clocking system inadequate. I'm hoping someone can point me in the
right direction.

Today I have log mode enabled so that each time I close a TODO item,
it records the date and time it was closed. At regular intervals while
working I add inactive timestamps to my notes. I've mapped that to a
single key, so it's quite fast. If I switch tasks, have an update,
made progress I want to note to myself, or leave and return I add an
inactive timestamp. I have well over 1000 inactive timestamps in my
current file.

Later I can open my agenda view on the working file, choose my
timespan (week or month), enable log mode to show when items were
closed, and then enable inactive timestamps to view all of the
timestamps. This itemizes all the events organized by time into a
timeline.

It's fairly straightforward from that timeline to count my hours based
on the record of where I spent my time. It is unfortunately a very
manual process.

I find Org's clocking to be too detailed, and that it doesn't play
well with dynamically organized hierarchies of notes. I frequently
create and close subtasks, or switch parts of the tree. Clocking each
one is too much overhead, and too granular. I don't need to provide
down to the minute reports of each item. It also doesn't appear to
allow rounding of values, so I still have to adjust the results.

What I envision is a way to count items in the agenda view to produce
a time report. Counting any inactive timestamp as 15 minutes, where if
a half hour or more is logged I round up to bill the hour. Closed TODO
items should count toward billing that whole hour. Clearly this should
be customized.

The point is that I'm not worried about accounting time by task,
instead I'm aggregating tasks into accounting by whole hours.

I'm looking at org-element, and it appears I'd have to do my own
agenda style scan of the whole tree to find items to classify by
hour. While I'm somewhat proficient at elisp, that sounds like a steep
wall to climb.

Is there an iterative way to review items in an agenda view so I can
do the math to produce a report?

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Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com
                                    https://www.adamsinfoserv.com/