The tasks feature can be used to record information to aid in day to day administrative duties both related and unrelated to jobs. Tasks can however be attached to jobs and are particularly useful where assignments are too cumbersome or unnecessary – for instance to create a reminder to call a customer and confirm the site address, it is easier and quicker to create a task for yourself rather than an assignment. If several tasks are required against a job, assignments for the technician will be listed together with assignments for the office staff and that can be undesirable.

The main difference is that Assignments are adapted for managing technicians time on site whilst tasks are designed for the administrative side of job management. For this reason there are no reports for tasks. They are meant for TSM operators and as such need only be viewed in TSM.

There are two ways to view a task in TSM:

• On the Tasks tab of a Job Card – only tasks for this job will be visible here.
• On the Tasks module in Utilities → Tasks – any task can potentially be viewed here.

To enter a task, follow the following steps:

1. Go to the Tasks module in the Utilities menu → Tasks (or press Alt+F4). Alternatively Press the “Add Task” button on the Tasks tab of the Job Card. The Tasks module will come up.
2. Press “New” at the top of the module.
3. Enter the subject – this line of text will appear in the tasks module and entering a concise description of a task will aid its identification.
4. Enter the detailed description and any notes in the fields provided.
5. Set the Employee this task is for. You can press the “Me” button to set it to yourself (the Employee ID you are logged into TSM with). You can also set the task to be public. It will be visible in every configuration of the module, viewed by anyone in TSM. You can set the task to “Private” and this will only be visible to yourself, even with the task view set to your Employee ID.
6. If the task is for a job, enter the job number now. You will see that the Customer ID is automatically populated with that of the job.
7. If the task is not for a job, but does relate to a customer in TSM – enter the Customer ID.
8. Enter the contact within the company that this task needs to be addressed with. Press the search button to be taken to the Contacts tab of the Contacts Maintenance module, select the contact and press Exit.
9. Enter the due date for the task. This feature will work in conjunction with the “See tasks due pop-up warnings?” tick box on the Employee Maintenance module. You can use the “First Available” button which works in same way as the analogous feature of Assignment Maintenance.
10. Set the priority.
11. Press “Save”. You will see the task appear in the list.
12. You can use the “Email” button next to the Employee ID to notify the employee of their task.

This concludes the workflow for creating a task.

The Tasks module contains several filter drop-downs that allow the user to quickly drill down to the necessary list of tasks in the potentially large list of old and current entries. These allow to sort by task due dates – future, current, etc, the employee allocated to the tasks (me/not me) and the Task Type which can be set up in Utilities→Code Setup→Task Type.

Tasks can be sorted by any of the columns in the list except the Subject. To do this simply click on the column. The list will be reordered in ascending order. Click it again and the list will-resort in descending order.

The start Timer button at the top of the screen allows the logged-in employee to accurately record the time taken attending to a given task. Pressing the button starts the timer and pressing it again stops it and pops up the Timesheet module. A timesheet can be entered at this point.

The lifecycle of an average task would be a short one. Any important information in the details and notes should probably be transferred to the job or another storage location, as it can potentially be lost or deleted if left in on the task. The notes fields are only meant for running notes to record the progress of the task.

Eventually a time comes to complete a task. This can be done by two persons: the original creator and the person the task is assigned to. This is a provision to ensure that TSM users take responsibility for the tasks they have entered or have been assigned to and that nobody else in TSM can accidentally alter the task.

To complete a task:

1. Enter any final notes.
2. Enter the completed date. You can double-click on the completed date field to populate it with the current date and time.
3. Press Save.