Why would a report of hours logged in a month show the hours dropping each time we run the report long after the month ended?

[ALLENAr]

At the beginning of each month we run a report on all hours logged by our team for each of the previous months in the year. For instance, right now we're running reports on hours logged by month in Jan, Feb, March & April.

We are stumped to understand why the hours logged in a month keeps dropping each month we run the report.

For example, when we ran January's report in early February, it showed 2,000 logged hours in January. But when we ran the same report in early March, it showed 1,900 hours logged in January. In early April it showed 1,850 logged in January ... and so on. (Hours in this example are rounded for illustration.)

We're experiencing this issue for all months -- not just January. And the hours only decrease -- they do not increase.

Only rarely do any users go back to reduce the hours logged on a project -- and this is not enough to explain the difference.

The filters appear below and do not change month-to-month.

So if the filters do not change, why would the result change?

Any ideas to help us troubleshoot this issue would be helpful. Thanks!

HOURS REPORT FILTERS:

Entry Date between 2020-01-01T00:00:00:000 and 2020-04-30T00:00:00:000

and Owner Home Group ID in 54be83d4004673e159357a9f0d295788, 54be83e100467c9d778f06488f1f83e5, 54501a7f00228ba5722b14bd0c20a425

and Project Status in Complete, Current, Dead, On Hold

[RichardPe1]

Have you extracted the underlying hours to analyse what hours are missing and look for a pattern or explanation?

My guess would be "Owner Home Group ID" part of the query. Do you have people that are moving out of those Home Groups as the year progress, or perhaps people that leave the company and when deactivated they lose the Home Group value?

What about if you try hardcoding the names of people in those Home Groups to see if that returns the same values as run in previous months?

As mentioned at the start, I would extract the underlying hours each month and keep them for future analysis.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Allen,

Similar to Richard's suggestion, whenever a Project's Project Status changes to match (or not match your filter's criteria), the hours for those Projects will then be included (or excluded), which could also explain some or all of the variance you're seeing over time.

Regards,

Doug