Ticketnumber mystery and approach to report billable hours

[Eraserhead]

Hi all,

First off i have have a question about what is the best way to approach the following situation.

Me and a colleague have been working in OTRS for 2 months now and i want to invoice our clients for time we spent on tickets.
I need to specify the time i spent on tickets separated from my colleague. I tried working with the Reports section but noticed that i could not separate time spent on a per user basis.

So i decided to use the Search function with export to CSV, is that the best way to go or am i overlooking something? A problem i still see is that it seems that the accountedtime is based on the last ticket owner and it doesn't show the time per interaction. For instance i worked on the ticket for 60 minutes and then the ticket changed ownership and my colleague worked on the ticket for 60 minutes.

When i use that option i can choose the time interval in these ways:
-Tickets changed during period of time
-Tickets created during period of time
-Tickets closed during period of time

Suppose i choose tickets 'changed during the period' of january and february. If i run the same selection on january and february separately and add that time the total is more then the selection of both months at the same time. The reason i found is that there were two tickets which were created in january but closed in february and there fore they end up in both the selection of changed january and changed february. So if i want to use this to bill my clients it won't work. because it will result in duplicate time being billed.

If i do the same method but use 'closed during this period' the separate exports and added exports amount to the same total time so that seems to be the best way? But what happens if a ticket is closed in february and then reopened in march, will the same time shown in the column 'Accountedtime' be shown for in both reports or will it split the time for the first closure and the second closure?

Finally i have a question about a ticketnumber that shows up in the CSV export but i can't find the number in the system?

In the CSV it shows ticketnumber 2012022710000240. When i do a full text search on it i can't find it. When i search on ticketnumber neither.
When i search on the subject i find the ticket but in OTRS it has number 2012022710000244. How is this possible?

[crythias]

I use the time accounting feature to track time rather than timestamps. YMMV viewtopic.php?f=60&t=12546

Re: ticketnumber. This is a limitation in Excel's precision and can't be worked around easily as a number, but if the ticket number is imported as text, it's possible.

[Eraserhead]

I still don't understand very well how the time accounting feature works. Is there a good guide somewhere?