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Using Timers

Introduction

In many customer service or project management scenarios, accurately tracking the time spent on each conversation or task is essential for billing, reporting, and productivity insights.

This is where Timers come in.

Timers help you record the actual time you spend working on a conversation. Instead of manually tracking and logging your hours, you can start a timer when you begin working and stop it when you’re done. This makes time logging easy, ensures your recorded time is accurate, and reduces the chance of forgetting to log your work.

Timers can later be converted into either:

  • Service charges, used for billing or invoicing, or

  • Time entries, used for internal tracking, reporting, or audits.

Whether you’re working from your desktop or switching between devices, timers provide a simple, reliable way to capture your work time as you go.

The Timer within the conversation page.

What are timers?

A Timer is a personal time-tracking tool associated with a specific conversation. It records the amount of time you spend working on that conversation.

Each user in a conversation can start and manage their own timer independently, giving full flexibility to teams working collaboratively.

Here’s how timers work:

  • You can start a timer when you begin working on a conversation.

  • The timer will continue to run until it is stopped.

  • Timers also run in the background, i.e., even if you log out or close your browser tab or device, time will continue to accumulate until stopped. This ensures uninterrupted time tracking.

  • Once you’ve completed the work, you can convert the timer into a service charge (for billing purposes) or a time entry (for time tracking purposes).

Timers are especially useful when:

  • You work on multiple conversations throughout the day.

  • You want to ensure clients are billed for the exact time spent.

  • You want to minimize the effort of tracking time manually.

You can pause, resume, cancel, or convert timers at any time depending on your workflow.

Timer actions

Starting a timer for a conversation

  1. Open the conversation.

  2. Click the Timer button in the toolbar.

  3. Start a new timer for a conversation
Press the Alt + Shift and then t keys to start a new timer using your keyboard.

Once the timer is started, you can see it on the conversation sidebar.

The timer panel within the conversation side bar.

Stopping a timer

You can pause the timer, for example, if you switch to another task or take a break, by clicking the Stop button. (You can always start a stopped timer, see below).

Stopping a timer

Start a stopped timer

You can start a stopped timer by clicking the Start button.

Start a stopped timer

Canceling a timer

You can remove the timer without logging any of the time it accumulated by clicking the X button.

Canceling a timer

Converting a timer into a new service charge

You can convert a timer to a new service charge using the Service option.

Convert a timer to a new service charge

Converting a timer to a new time entry

You can convert a timer into a new time entry using the Time option.

Convert a timer to a new time entry
A single service charge or time entry cannot exceed 24 hours. If the timer has been running for more than 24 hours, the logged time will be capped at 23:59 when creating a service charge or time entry. The remaining time will be retained with the timer and can be used separately for another service charge or time entry.

Timers list

Working with the timers list

You may be working on multiple conversations at the same time or jumping between different conversations throughout the day. Timers support all such workflows and scenarios.

You can view a list of all your timers by clicking the Timer icon in the top-right corner.

View a list of all your timers

The timers list will open and you’ll see all of the different timers you have and their state.

View a list of all your timers

Directly from the list that shows you can:

  • Go to the conversation details page the timer is associated with.

  • Stop a running timer.

  • Start a stopped timer.

  • Cancel a timer.

  • Convert a timer into a service charge.

  • Convert a timer into a time entry.

  • Start a new timer (Available only inside the conversation details page).

Timers overall state

You can tell whether you have any timers and if so whether there’s a running timer even before opening the list of timers.

The Timer icon itself indicates the overall state of your timers:

  • White – You do not have any timers.

    Timer icon when there are no any timers
  • Green – At least one of your timers is running.

    Timer icon when at least one timer is running
  • Red – You have one or more timers but they are all stopped.

    Timer icon when all timers are stopped
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