Enable Global Cost Code Selection in Ontraccr

🧾 Enable Global Cost Code Selection in Ontraccr

📘 Overview

Ontraccr includes a setting called Enable Global Cost Code Selection, which lets field staff use any global cost code when logging time — even if that cost code wasn’t pre-added to the project.

This feature is ideal for lite or high-level job costing, where you want to track hours per task but haven’t created a full project budget.

⚙️ Where to Find the Setting

1. Go to Settings
2. Click Time Tracking
3. Scroll to the Clock Settings section
4. Toggle: Enable Global Cost Codes for Projects

🧩 What This Setting Does

When enabled:

• Workers can select from the Global Cost Codes list while clocking into any project
• Project-specific codes will still appear at the top of the selection menu
• Global codes appear underneath — separated visually
• If the user selects a Global cost code:
  • It is automatically added to the project behind the scenes
  • But no budget or estimate is assigned to it

✅ Use Case

Enable this when:

• You want basic job costing insights (e.g. "where are my hours going?")
• You haven’t created a full budget yet
• You want to avoid manually adding codes to every project

📱 Where It Works

• As of the session date, support for Global Cost Code selection on web was not working consistently and may be limited to mobile.

🔁 Behavior Summary

📊 Reporting Impact

• If this setting is used without a full budget:
  • The Progress Page will still show actuals
  • Top-level budget comparisons will be empty or partial
  • Use case is hour breakdown and actual cost tracking, not variance analysis

🧠 Tips

• Use this setting with lite job costing or service jobs
• Turn it off if you want strict cost code control
• Consider applying default hourly/daily cost overrides on global codes to ensure cost accuracy, even without budgets