Roles and task types

Roles and task types are two separate settings that get confused with each other. This is what each one actually decides, and how they interact when an hour is sent.

Roles

A role is who somebody is charged as — Field Surveyor, Plant Operator, whatever your staff actually call it. Add one on Roles with a Name, and nothing else: a role carries no price of its own. What it costs is set per project, on that project's rate table, because the same role can be worth a different rate on two different jobs.

A role's name is what prints under Charged as on the works summary a client receives, so name it the way you want a client to read it. Every organisation starts with one role already there, Field worker, which you can rename or add to at any time.

Task types

A task type is what somebody was doing — site work, travel, a calc-up, lunch. Add one on Task types with a Name and, if you want staff to see it, a Description.

Every task type has a Kind, and it decides two things: whether hours recorded against it are paid, and whether they can reach a client invoice.

• Chargeable is paid and goes on the client's invoice. Site work is the usual one.
• Not chargeable is paid but never invoiced — yard time, a toolbox talk, travel you do not bill. The hours are still recorded, still appear on a timesheet, and still go into the payroll export. They just never reach an invoice, because the task type itself says not to charge them, not because nobody priced them.
• Unpaid is neither paid nor invoiced — an unpaid lunch break, say. Unpaid hours are left out of payroll, the payroll export, Xero timesheets, the hours totals on Summaries, Home and the calendar, and dockets. See recording an unpaid break.

A new task type starts as Not chargeable, the safe side: paid, and never invoiced by accident. Change the Kind on Task types whenever you need to. A change applies to hours that have not been sent to payroll yet; a period already sent stays as it was sent. To re-pay it, reverse the send and send again.

New businesses start with Lunch already set to Unpaid. If you signed up before 16 October 2026, your Lunch is still paid until you open Task types and set its Kind to Unpaid.

That distinction matters when a project's rate table has no line for a role: an hour recorded against a chargeable task and an unpriced role blocks sending until you price it or change the task type's Kind to Not chargeable. An hour recorded against a task type that is not chargeable and that same unpriced role is not affected at all — it was never going to the invoice either way, so there is nothing to block.

Photos decides whether this task type offers the camera on a timesheet line. It is on for a new task type, and the sensible ones to turn off are travel and breaks — there is nothing to photograph on a lunch break, and the control is only clutter on the phone of somebody recording one. Turning it off later never removes photos already taken; it only stops new ones. See photos on a timesheet line.