How To Calculate Time

There are several time fields in Collect! that mark important moments in the life of an account. Examples of these are debtor worked time, contact created time, contact done time and transaction created time. Another example is the Time field in the Contact form, used to create timed contacts.

Time fields may be used to create conditional expressions in reports and control files. Time fields may be added or subtracted to calculate elapsed time. Hours or minutes can be added to time.

All this is possible with a few requirements kept in mind:

• Time format for calculations is hoursminutesseconds without spaces or colons.
• Use two places for each value.
• Use the twenty-four hour clock.

Examples:

@varTime = 101545
This is 10:15:45 AM

@varTime = 221545
This is 10:15:45 PM

@co.ct - 300000
This is contact created time minus 3 hours

@(de.wt-co.dt)
This is debtor worked time minus contact done time

Current time is stored in @t

You may add or subtract from this to use in calculations, using time variables. To declare a Time variable, simply initialize your variable to a time field.

@varTime = @de.wt
@varFlag = 1 if (@varTime < @t+020000)

One use of this is timezones. For an example of setting the color of the phone field depending on time zones please refer to Help topic Timezone Alerts.

Go to the Member Center and download a report snippet for formatting time using the twelve hour clock, AM and PM.

Go to the Member Center Add-Ons page.

See Also

- Timezone Alerts