Problem
When managing a support team (or working solo), there's no way to answer the question: "How many hours of work are sitting in our open tickets?"
Without this, you can't tell if you have 5 hours of work in the queue or 50. You only know the count of open tickets — but a password reset (5 minutes) and a server migration (6 hours) look the same.
Proposed Solution
Add a built-in estimated_hours field to HD Ticket (Float, optional).
- When it's set: An agent fills it in when they first review the ticket — a rough estimate of how long the work will take (e.g., 0.5, 1, 4 hours)
- Where it's visible: Ticket detail view, and optionally in list and Kanban views
- How it's used: Teams can sum estimated hours across open tickets to see total workload in hours, not just ticket count
Example
| Ticket |
Priority |
Estimated Hours |
| Printer not working |
Medium |
0.5 |
| Email migration |
High |
4 |
| Password reset |
Low |
0.25 |
| Server crash investigation |
Urgent |
3 |
| Total workload |
|
7.75 hours |
Knowing "we have 7.75 hours of work queued" is far more useful than "we have 4 open tickets."
Additional Context
This pairs naturally with time tracking (#2351) — estimated hours tells you what's coming, actual hours tells you what happened. But estimated hours has standalone value even without time tracking.
Problem
When managing a support team (or working solo), there's no way to answer the question: "How many hours of work are sitting in our open tickets?"
Without this, you can't tell if you have 5 hours of work in the queue or 50. You only know the count of open tickets — but a password reset (5 minutes) and a server migration (6 hours) look the same.
Proposed Solution
Add a built-in
estimated_hoursfield to HD Ticket (Float, optional).Example
Knowing "we have 7.75 hours of work queued" is far more useful than "we have 4 open tickets."
Additional Context
This pairs naturally with time tracking (#2351) — estimated hours tells you what's coming, actual hours tells you what happened. But estimated hours has standalone value even without time tracking.