Faster Time: Sorting and Filtering the Work Report

Faster Time will track everything you do on your computer if you want it to.  If you work on a lot of different things each day, it might be a little bit intimidating to see a list of everything you worked on at the end of the day.

Let’s take a look at how we can sort and filter our Faster Time work report to make it easier to work with.  We’ll open the work report by going to New on the Faster Ribbon and clicking the Activity Tracking button.  The left panel on the work report contains several options for sorting and filtering our activities.

At the top of the left panel, we can choose whether we would like to include time entries and expense entries in this list.  If we uncheck one of the boxes, that type of entry won’t even appear.

We can also choose whether to include entries that have or have not been assigned automatically to matters, so we can easily look through our unassigned entries to find activities to bill without having to worry about things that have already been assigned to a matter.

Another option is to filter the work report by date.  If we click the calendar icon we can choose a specific date to look at without viewing activities that started on other days.  It’s important to remember that Faster Time tracks activities based on when they were started, so if we opened a document for the first time on one day and worked on it more another day without removing the entry from the work report, it will still show up under the day it was first opened.

The next filtering setting lets us configure a minimum time to use when displaying entries.  If we don’t want to see anything that took less than a certain amount of time, we can just select that time from the list and we’ll only see activities that we may be interested in billing based on how long they took.

The last option for filtering the work report is to filter specific columns by the information contained in them.   If we look at the top of the activity list, we’ll see a funnel icon over a few of the columns.  This means we can filter this column and clicking the funnel icon will open a menu that lets us configure exactly how we want to filter.  For example, we can filter the work report by application by clicking the funnel over the application column and selecting one or more applications that we want to view activities for.  These filters can be combined with the other filters on the left to really specifically narrow down what we want to see in the activity list.

Next let’s look at the sorting options available on the left panel.

Our first option is to view activities sorted into collapsible menus first by matter then by date, or by date and then matter.  If you would prefer to see your entries organized a little bit more chronologically, then date then matter would probably be your preference.

We can also select what time frame to use when organizing matters, from one day all the way down to 15 minute increments.  Setting this time frame lower will create more collapsible menus, but it will allow us to view our activities in the order we actually worked on them instead of all grouped into one collapsible menu for the whole day.

Now that our work report is sorted and filtered, we should have no problems finding the activities we actually want to bill in Clio.