question and use example

[Paul Menair <pmenair@gmail.com>]

Folks,

I've been struggling with something and thought I'd ask you folks.

I'm an attorney.  I use org-mode for various things, because it's convenient, simple and flexible.  And most case management software for lawyers is awful.  Anyway, one of the things I do in org is keep my time.  

The ordinary timekeeping function in org is interesting and neat in some ways, but not useful for my purposes.  I need to provide my employer with a set of timeslips, where each record consists of a date, client name, description, and time interval in decimal form.  Everything that I've tried that attempts to "help" me do this fails in one way or another.  The solution I have is a table in org that is set up like this:

| date | client | desc | [time]--[time] | H:M | x.x |

Org is perfect for this because it does what no other time and billing solution I've seen does -- it lets me just record two timestamps in plain text and get an interval.  The only other piece of software I've ever seen that does this was a calendar program that let you do this in its notes field.

My problem is this.  I populate the fifth field with c-- c-u c-y.  I would be nice if it happened automatically, but that's no big deal.  However, I've been going through and manually entering the sixth field, and that does end up being a hassle.

Calc seems to only work on timestamps and not have any straight way to convert H:M to decimal.  I suppose I could keep my in and out timestamps in separate fields and figure out a way to have calc work on them, but it seems like there should be an easier solution.

Any thoughts?  In any event, I thought it might be of interest for folks to see a use case from a non-engineering professional.

Paul