Another Day, Another Change to Workfront that Wasnt Communicated: Legacy Actual Hours

[JustinRenteria2]

Hi, I was looking at a project report that contained a column for "Actual Hours" and noticed that the column has been renamed to "Legacy Actual Hours". I also noticed that there are now two fields in the report builder: 

1. Legacy Actual Hours

2. Actual Hours

The release notes do state that there was a change coming to the Actual Hours field but it wasn't going to happen until later in 2025.  There was no mention of any impacts to current reporting functionality. I wish they wouldve communicated this change so I could update the column names on views and reports.  Now Im sure I'll get some questions from my user base regarding this new field.  

[JustinRenteria2]

To make things weirder the new Actual Hours field does not take mins into account.  It's essentially an inaccurate count of the Actual Hours.  Legacy Actual Hours still takes the minutes into acct.:

[Holly_Benjamin]

Just notice this on all of my reports - going to have a minefield of questions asked and need to rename a ton of columns in live reports with this rolling out! 🫠

[BillBos1]

The fact that they are just removing the partial hours or minutes completely definitely makes the math pretty inaccurate.  2.75 hours becomes 2 hours.  Anybody had any clarity from support?

[HeatherRo9]

From Support:

"The difference in these fields is the format that the number is stored in. The Legacy field will give the work as a whole number, while the new field allows a decimal amount for greater precision. More information can be found in this article, "

[JustinRenteria2]

hmm their response doesn't make sense bc the legacy field is the one that has decimals while the new field does not.  We're losing precision. I think the support person got confused

[HeatherRo9]

Yes, I reached back out and got this "My apologies! You are right on the fields - I misread them on my end and gave the definitions backward. I am checking in with our Product team on this - the only difference in the two that I can see in my documentation is the format of the number."

[CBuckwal]

@monicacardoso Do you have any insight on the new Actual Hours field not showing partial hour times? We have teams that account for time in quarter hours, so this is a big issue. Is there any discussion to adjust the new Actual Hours field to show time in partial hours? Thanks

[HeatherRo9]

It seems you will need to make sure you are using the "Legacy Actual Hours" field if you want partial hour times to show. 

[CBuckwal]

That's what it looks like for now. I'm guessing that the legacy actual hours field will be removed at some point, so it would make more sense if the replacement actual hours field showed partial hours, as the field it replaced showed hours. It's a frustrating change. 

[CBuckwal]

Timesheets are still showing partial hour times, so I guess timesheets are using the legacy actual hours field. I wonder how long that will be in place.. 

[HeatherRo9]

Another support update:

"I wanted to follow up with you on this case. The reason for the change in fields was to update how the actual hours are stored in the database. For the legacy field, work is stored in minutes in the database, and then converted and displayed in hours when called for by the site. The new field stores and displays the work in hours with no conversion needed. Both fields should show a decimal amount, but the new field appears to be rounding down. The Product team is investigating that so that we can correct it."

[JP_Beuses1]

Hey Heather, did you by chance get any update from support since then around this being resolved or any mention if Legacy Actual Hours was going to be supported vs retired?

[HeatherRo9]

The Legacy and Actual hours fields should now be displaying the same and correctly.
"The new field isn't supposed to change the information you see, just how we store it. "

I assume it will be a retired API call at some point down the road?

[tibormolnar]

The two fields do show the same value now, indeed:

Interestingly, the new Actual Hours field comes with the option to select a format, whereas the Legacy Actual Hours field only offers the option "Integer" in the field format select:

But this is just a seemingly existing option, because even if the format 1234 (doubleAsInt) is selected, upon saving the report this preference gets lost and the default format (compound) is applied.

As for the API:

v.19 does not include the new field yet, the 'Unsupported' version has it already:

[_Manish_Singh]

There is 42,000 hours difference between Actual Hours and Legacy Actual Hours. Could someone clarify why this is the case? All the hours recorded for that task are from after May 2021.

My question is related to the Q3 update. Image below for reference:

[-JC]

No answers for you, but wanted to pipe up on a similar issue I'm seeing on this same topic. In Workfront, I'm not seeing any difference between the two fields when viewed in a Project report. However, when I export that report to Excel, there is suddenly a significant difference between the two fields  - see screenshot.

[-JC]

Actually @_Manish_Singh - I just opened up my Workfront report parameters to include every project entered May 2021 and later, and I have a slight discrepancy.

Legacy Actual Hours: 279726.72 Hours

Actual Hours: 279766.85 Hours

[skyehansen]

I'd like to encourage you both to submit a case to Support. I'm also rolling this question under an existing discussion, in order to generate more collaboration.

[JP_Beuses1]

I am experiencing the same issues and submitted a support ticket this morning regarding the export portion of why there is a discrepancy in the Actual Hours values when compared between the online report and the exported report. There are countless records where online, Actual Hours and Legacy Actual Hours appear to match but then when I download the report the Actual Hours column in the excel export is blank. Below is an image of that for reference.