Automation#30: Auto-Update Time Entry to the Nearest 5 Minutes

Automation#30: Auto-Update Time Entry to the Nearest 5 Minutes



Hello Everyone, 
Time tracking is a feature in Zoho Desk to help businesses stay organized and efficient. For Zylker Techfix, this feature has helped to track the duration of gadget services to generate accurate bills.
However, Zylker Techfix faced a unique challenge: they needed to round off time entries for precise billing calculations. Manually adjusting each entry was time-consuming and prone to errors. A simple custom function helped in auto-adjustments in time entry.
Zylker Techfix automated the process of rounding time entries to the nearest 5 minutes. This not only saved time but also ensured accuracy in their billing operations.
In this week’s post, we share this custom function with you! 
Follow the steps below to set up your workflow rule and automate your time entries for seamless billing.

Prerequisites
1. Create a connection
  1.1 Go to Setup(S) and choose Connections under Developer Space.
  1.2 Click Create Connection.
  1.3 Select Zoho OAuth under Default Connection.
  1.4 Set the connection name as connection.
  1.5 Under Scope, choose the below scope values:
Desk.tickets.UPDATE
  1.6 Click Create and Connect.
  1.7 Click Connect.
  1.8 Choose the Desk's organization to connect with Deluge, and click Submit.
  1.9 Click Accept.
Connection is created successfully.

Create a Workflow Rule
1. Go to Setup, choose Workflows under Automation. 
2. Under Workflows, click Rules >> Create Rule.

In the Basic Information section,
3. Select Time Entry from the drop-down menu under Module.
4. Enter a Rule Name and Description for the rule.
5. If you want to activate the rule right away, select the Active checkbox. Else, create the rule and activate it later.
6. Click Next.
 
In the Execute on section, follow these steps:
7. Select Create.   
8. Click Next.
 
9. In the Criteria section, add criteria if required. click Next. 
10. In the Actions section, click the + icon and select New next to Custom Functions.
11. Under Basic Information, Enter a Name and Description for the custom function. Choose Time Entry under Module.
12. Under Argument Mapping, give a desired Method Name. Map the arguments as below: 
       12.1 In the Argument Name field, type timeEntryId and select Time Entry Id under the Time Entry Section.
       12.2 In the Argument Name field, type ticketId and select Ticket Id under the Time Entry Section. 
       12.3 In the Argument Name field, type minutesSpent and select Minutes spent under the Time Entry Section.                                      
13. In the script window, insert the Custom Function given below:
  1. //---------- User Input ------------
  2. roundOffValue = 5;
  3. deskURL = "https://desk.zoho.com"; // Replace .com based on your DC
  4. //----------------------------------
  5. logs = Collection();
  6. reminder = minutesSpent % roundOffValue;
  7. minutesSpent = minutesSpent - reminder + roundOffValue;
  8. params = Map();
  9. params.put("minutesSpent",minutesSpent);
  10. params.put("secondsSpent",0);
  11. params.put("hoursSpent",0);
  12. updateTimeEntry = invokeurl
  13. [
  14. url :deskURL + "/api/v1/tickets/" + ticketId + "/timeEntry/" + timeEntryId
  15. type :PATCH
  16. parameters:params.toString()
  17. connection:"connection"
  18. ];
  19. logs.insert("updateTimeEntry":updateTimeEntry);
  20. info logs;
NOTE
 In Line 3, Replace ".com" with the domain extension based on your Data Center.
14. Click Save to save the custom function.
15. Click Save again to save the workflow.
Point to Remember 
This custom function rounds up the minutes in the Time Entry module. For example, 00:38:48 will be rounded up to 00:40:00, and 01:56:56 will be rounded up to 02:00:00.
We hope this custom function makes your time tracking smoother. We’d love to hear how this works for you! Share your feedback and connect with us for more tips and insights. Happy ticketing!

Regards,
Lydia | Zoho Desk

    • Sticky Posts

    • Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community

      With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features

    • Share your Zoho Desk story with us!

      Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge. 

    • Tip #1: Learn to pick the right channels

      Mail, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms—there are so many support channels out there. Trying to pick the right channels to offer your customers can get pretty confusing. Emails are most useful when the customer wants to put things on record. However, escalated or complicated issues should not be resolved over email because it's slow and impersonal.  When you need immediate responses, live chat is more suitable. It's also quick and convenient, so it's the go-to channel for small issues. 

    • Welcome to Zoho Desk Community - Say hello here!

      Hello everyone! Though we have been here for a while, it’s time to formally establish the Zoho Desk Community; we’re really happy to have you all here! This can be the place where you take a moment to introduce yourself to the rest of the community. We’d love to hear all about you, what you do, what company or industry you work for, how you use Zoho Desk and anything else that you will like to share! Here’s a little about me. I am Chinmayee. I have been associated with Zoho since 2014. I joined here

    • Webinar 1: Blueprint for Customer Service

      With the launch of a host of new features in Zoho Desk, we thought it’ll be great to have a few webinars to help our customers make the most of them. We’re starting off with our most talked about feature, Blueprint in Zoho Desk. You can register for the Blueprint webinar here: The webinar will be delivered by our in-house product experts. This is a good opportunity to ask questions to our experts and understand how Blueprint can help you automate your service processes. We look forward to seeing

    • Recent Topics

    • Introducing AI-powered Assessments & Zoho's native LLM, Zia

      We’ve shipped a cleaner, faster way to create assessments in Zoho Recruit. 🚀 Instead of manually building question banks or copying old templates, you can now generate ready-to-use assessments in just a few clicks, all tailored to the role you’re hiring

    • Ability to Reset Visitor Fields During an Active Chat Flow

      Hello Zoho SalesIQ Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to propose a feature enhancement to Zoho SalesIQ regarding the management of visitor fields within Zobot flows. Use Case: Our bot asks the visitor to provide information about a 3rd person

    • The Social Wall: August 2025

      Hello everyone, As summer ends, Zoho Social is gearing up for some exciting, bigger updates lined up for the months ahead. While those are in the works, we rolled out a few handy feature updates in August to keep your social media management running smoothly.

    • External ID in Zoho CRM

      Hello everyone! We know that Zoho CRM allows you to integrate third-party apps and manipulate data through APIs. While you integrate a third-party application, you may want to store the third-party reference IDs in Zoho CRM's records. To meet this need

    • New in Zoho Chat : Search for contacts, files, links & conversations with the all new powerful 'Smart Search' bar.

      With the newly revamped 'Smart Search' bar in Zoho Chat, we have made your search for contacts, chats, files and links super quick and easy using Search Quantifiers.   Search for a contact or specific conversations using quantifiers, such as, from: @user_name - to find chats or channel conversations received from a specific user. to: @user_name - to find chats or channel conversations sent to a specific user. in: #channel_name - to find a particular instance in a channel. in: #chat_name - to find

    • Aggregating the First Value in the Group By of a dataset

      Hi I am trying to get the following Aggregate Formula to work in my chart, but cannot seem to get the right format. I have a series of data that I am running an include_groupby and want to SUM only a column in the first row of each group. So for example.

    • Is it possible for contacts to "Re-enter" a workflow in Zoho Campaign?

      We are currently working on a way to automatically add users to from one list to other lists based on specific criteria, but can't seem to find a native way of doing this so we are trying to use Workflows to do this. So, for example, if a user's status is set to "Active," then they should be added to the list "Active Users." If the same user's status is then set to "Paused," they should be added to the list "Paused Users" and removed from the list "Active Users." This works fine for the first go

    • Admin Control Over Profile Picture Visibility in Zoho One

      Hello Zoho Team, We hope you are doing well. Currently, as per Zoho’s design, each user can manage the visibility of their profile picture from their own Zoho Accounts page: accounts.zoho.com → Personal Information → Profile Picture → Profile Picture

    • How can I track which zoho users are actively using Zoho CRM

      I have several licenses of Zoho CRM. We now need to add a new user. I could purchase a new license, but before I do, I would like to see if any of our existing users are not actively using the license assigned to them. How can I determine the activity

    • Seriously - Create multiple contacts for leads, (With Company as lead) Zoho CRM

      In Zoho CRM, considering a comapny as a lead, you need us to allow addition of more than one contact. Currently the Lead Section is missing "Add contact" feature which is available in "Accounts". When you know that a particular lead can have multiple

    • Track Zoho Campaign and Workflow sales impact

      I am attempting to measure the performance of our marketing workflows and campaigns by comparing the date each campaign was sent to a contact with the purchase date of the contact. For example, if Contact A was sent Email A on 9/1 and made a purchase

    • Zoho / Outlook Calendar sync

      The current Marketplace -> Microsoft -> Meetings integration needs 2 changes. 1. The current language for the Two-Way sync option should be changed. It currently states, "Sync both your Zoho CRM Calendar and Office 365 Calendar meetings with each other."

    • Tables for Europe Datacenter customers?

      It's been over a year now for the launch of Zoho Tables - and still not available für EU DC customers. When will it be available?

    • What is a line break code for zoho?

      Hi, I am archiving data by adding values from a single line field from one form to a multi-line field in another form. So I need a code/function that starts a new line on that multi-line field so it does not just keep adding it on the same line. Example, doing something like this means that it will be on a same line. archive.field1 = archive.field1 + input.Field1 I need a code so the input.Field1 can just start on the next line. Instead of "value 1, 2,3,4,5" It will be: "1 2 3 4 etc.".  something

    • Automatic Project Owner change

      Is there a way to change Project Owner automatically once a specific Milestone in a project is marked as completed. Different Teams are working on projects in our Org, they have their own Milestones to complete and so we transfer the project from team

    • Button to add product to cart

      Is there a way to have a button on a page, that when clicked, will add Qty 1 of a product to the cart?

    • Problem with Submit Button Design

      I have made a template to apply to my forms and under the button controls, I have it set to "standard" and yet it's still filling the container. This is super frustrating and looks weird. Why do we not have full control over button size? How can I fix

    • Zoho CRM- Authorize your Microsoft Teams account issue

      Hi, I tried to link Zoho CRM with Teams and I got the following message: Clicking "Authorize now" sent me to the following page, Microsoft tried to start a session but, after 3 seconds the page closed and nothing happened. I get the same message each

    • Passing the CRM

      Hi, I am hoping someone can help. I have a zoho form that has a CRM lookup field. I was hoping to send this to my publicly to clients via a text message and the form then attaches the signed form back to the custom module. This work absolutely fine when

    • Is there a way to associate an email in ZOHO Main to a Vendor record in ZOHO CRM

      My situation is as below, I have a vendor in ZOHO CRM lets say "Vend A" and an associated contact, "Cont A" If Cont A sends me an email using the email I've registered in the contact record the standard OOTB email sync will work. But the vendor has some

    • Adding a developer for editing the client application with a single user license

      Hi, I want to know that I as a developer I developed one application and handed over to the customer who is using the application on a single user license. Now after6 months customer came back to me and needs some changes in the application. Can a customer

    • Kaizen #207 - Answering your Questions | Advanced Queries using COQL API

      Hi everyone, and welcome to another Kaizen week! As part of Kaizen #200 milestone, many of you shared topics you would like us to cover, and we have been addressing them one by one over the past few weeks. Today, we are picking up one of those requests

    • Présentation de SecureForms dans Zoho Vault

      Soyons francs : demander à quelqu’un de transmettre un mot de passe ou des informations sensibles n’est jamais une tâche facile. On attend, on relance, parfois de nombreuses fois. Et quand l’information arrive, elle se retrouve souvent dispersée dans

    • Introducing Connected Records to bring business context to every aspect of your work in Zoho CRM for Everyone

      Hello Everyone, We are excited to unveil phase one of a powerful enhancement to CRM for Everyone - Connected Records, available only in CRM's Nextgen UI. With CRM for Everyone, businesses can onboard all customer-facing teams onto the CRM platform to

    • Granular Email Forwarding Controls in Zoho Mail (Admin Console and Zoho One)

      Hello Zoho Mail Team, How are you? At present, the Zoho Mail Admin Console allows administrators to configure email forwarding for an entire mailbox, forwarding all incoming emails to another address. This is helpful for delegation or backup purposes,

    • Sales order & purchase order item links for item details

      This is fantastic for checking lots of things, I use it a lot. It would be great to see it extended to invoices & bills On another note, may as well throw in my favourite whinge ..... Wish you guys would get the PO receive differences sorted urgently,

    • Custom Fonts in Zoho CRM Template Builder

      Hi, I am currently creating a new template for our quotes using the Zoho CRM template builder. However, I noticed that there is no option to add custom fonts to the template builder. It would greatly enhance the flexibility and branding capabilities if

    • Problem with Email an invoice with multiple attachments using API

      I have an invoice with 3 attachments. When I send an email manually using the UI, everything works correctly. I receive an email with three attachments. The problem occurs when I try to initiate sending an email using the API. The email comes with only

    • Zoho Workdrive - Communication / Chat Bar

      Hi Team, Please consider adding an option to allow admins to turn on or off the Zoho Communication Bar. Example of what I mean by Communication Bar: It's such a pain sometimes when I'm in WorkDrive and I want to share a link to a file with a colleague

    • Introducing Profile Summary: Faster Candidate Insights with Zia

      We’re excited to launch Profile Summary, a powerful new feature in Zoho Recruit that transforms how you review candidate profiles. What used to take minutes of resume scanning can now be assessed in seconds—thanks to Zia. A Quick Example Say you’re hiring

    • Kaizen #190 - Queries in Custom Related Lists

      Hello everyone! Welcome back to another week of Kaizen! This week, we will discuss yet another interesting enhancement to Queries. As you all know, Queries allow you to dynamically retrieve data from CRM as well as third-party services directly within

    • Need the ability to have read only fields on a form.

      There needs to be functionality in Creator that allows a field on a form to be read only. Most screen building software applications have this capability. I know you can hide certain fields from specific users and that you can also make the whole form read only but that's not the functionality I need. I want to be able to create a form where certain fields are editable and other are for display purposes only (read only). For example if the form was displaying information on an item that the user

    • Reverse payment on accidentally closed invoice.

      An invoice was closed accidentally with the full payment added. However, only partial payment was paid. How can I reopen the invoice and reverse this to update it to show partial payment?

    • New integration: Track booking page appointments in Google Analytics 4

      Hello all, Greetings from the Zoho Bookings team! We’re excited to introduce our new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) integration designed to help you track booking activity, understand customer behavior, and measure marketing performance, all in one place. What

    • Zoho Books Sandbox environment

      Hello. Is there a free sandbox environment for the developers using Zoho Books API? I am working on the Zoho Books add-on and currently not ready to buy a premium service - maybe later when my add-on will start to bring money. Right now I just need a

    • How to list emails in a folder, e.g. Inbox, on multiple pages when using Zoho mail webpage?

      Something as shown in the figure. There are totally 50 emails in Sent folder. If "Mail per page" equals 20, then the Sent folder is split into 3 pages. When I wander through Sent folder, I can just select a specific page to jump to. BTW, it seems that

    • Zoho Calendar soft bounce on @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses

      Hello, our Zoho calendar recently does not send the calendar invites to emails with hotmail and yahoo domains and comes back with a "soft bounce". other domains like Gmail works fine. Also sending "email" to the same emails to the above domains work well

    • IMAP Server not responding.

      Trying to connect a phone via IMAP and getting "imap.zoho.com not responding." Is the server down, for maintenance or otherwise? I've tried this on two different devices and got the same error on both.

    • ERROR CODE :512 - 5.4.4 DNS error:NXDOMAIN.

      Suddenly we cant send mail, we are getting this error for all outbound mail to multiple domains.

    • New in Cadences: WhatsApp follow-ups, upgraded limits, and options for add-ons

      Hello everyone, We're rolling out two key updates to help you engage better and scale smarter with Cadences in Zoho CRM. Reach customers on WhatsApp, directly from Cadences Previously, Cadences have enabled you to automate follow-ups through emails, calls,

    • Next Page