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Entering Duration -- hours and minutes without AM/PM

ScottJones1

I want to add a field in my Survey123 Connect that tracks the duration of time spend volunteering. So this is not the amount of time it takes to fill out the survey, post event I will identify the

Date, Volunteer Program, (HOW LONG I WAS THERE) and notes.

How Long I Was There, ideally I would like to be able to enter 2:30 and have survey record as 2 hrs 30 minutes, NOT 2:30 AM or 2:30 PM.

Then hopefully in either a Dashboard or Survery123 Analyze, see the total amount of hours. Or I can export to excel.

If this is impossible, how do I create a Start Time - Finish Time and calculate the difference?

Not going to lie, why has no one created a Duration field that can track hours not time?

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Accepted answers

Neal_t_k

@ScottJones1 The simplest would be just to ask them to either enter the number of minutes in an integer question. Or ask for hours in decimal decimal. (e.g. 1.5 hrs). Then you can make the calculations easier in dashboard/excel. If you want to have hours and minutes entry, see my post above.

@TylerGraham2's solution should work if you want to have the user enter a start and stop time, but then you have to deal with the calculation to get decimal hours. And possible user error with AM/PM/Date.

All comments

Neal_t_k

So what about making two integer questions and the concating them to the format you want. There are a couple options in appearance to make the number input easier (spinner, numbers)

Summarizing in a dashboard might be a little trickier, You may want to consider just entering the number as the number of minutes, or consider a decimal hour. If you want them to enter hours and minutes as above, then convert the hours to minutes and add the two fields in minutes (or divide the total minutes by 60 to get the decimal hours).

Another option, You could make it a choice list and preconfigure the options:

VenkataKondepati

The blog created might help you.
Dates and Time in Survey123 - Esri Community

DavidSolari

If Scott can leverage JavaScript functions something like this StackOverflow question should be enough to calculate an end time given a start time and some combination of duration questions.

SMauri

Hi,

before jumping to a technical solution, I think it’s worth clarifying one thing first:
what do you actually mean by “time spent volunteering”?

Do you want to track:

only the time spent filling in the Survey123 form / doing the digital survey, or
the overall time dedicated to volunteering, which might also include travel, preparation, field work, coordination, etc.?

This makes a big difference in how the time should be captured.

If your goal is just to measure how long the survey (or the digital task) takes, Survey123 already gives you a simple option: the hidden system metadata fields start and end. They automatically store when the form is opened and submitted, and you can calculate the duration (minutes or hours) later, for example in a Dashboard using an Arcade expression. No AM/PM issues, and it’s easy to aggregate.

If instead you want users to declare their total volunteering time, then start/end probably isn’t the right tool, and explicit duration fields (hours/minutes or total minutes) would be more appropriate.

Just wanted to throw this out there, since the “right” solution really depends on what kind of time you’re trying to measure.

Hope it helps 🙂

Cheers

Stefano

TylerGraham2

I use time fields on a form to track start and stop times for work stoppages. I then have a decimal field for duration that calculates to the nearest 10th of an hour. You need to convert your time to decimal time to do any sort of time related math. Here's the formula I use in the calculation column of the Duration field to get a result in hours and 10ths of hours.

round((decimal-time(${stop_end}) - decimal-time(${stop_begin}))*24,1)

Screenshot 2026-01-29 072043.png

ScottJones1

I just want to be able to record the (hours/minutes). It is a fairly simple survey, I will grab the Hosting Agency, Date/Time (mainly to catch the date), what I was doing, where I was at.. then I would like to be able to just record 2:30 for 2 hours and 30 minutes.

If it was possible to have a running tally on a dashboard that would be great, but I would like to at least be able to export to an excel file and use excels functionality to calculate the total time in (h):mm

At the end of the year, my company will make a contribution to these agencies based on my hours...

ScottJones1

Thanks Tyler,

Can I have a follow up question? how would you recommend getting the SUM of Stoppage Duration, if not Dashboards in Excel?

Scott

Neal_t_k

ScottJones1

I think you are right and I should just KISS, these are not billable hours and I would be fine to .25,.5,.75 my hours. If I end up needing more specific to the minute, I will utilize your solution below, I might even try it just to have it in waiting..

thanks

TylerGraham2

It is going to depend on how you want to display the data. The duration field I use is a decimal field with hours as the whole numbers. The industry this is for tracks things in hours down to the nearest 10th, so for my reporting it is literally just a sum of the data in that field.

TylerGraham2

There's always the chance for error whenever you have someone input data. The most common data entry error I encounter is people spelling their own name wrong.

OP will need to figure out where they want the errors to manifest and set controls to limit the severity of errors. e.g. with Time fields you could put a constraint that they have to be the same day, or that end time can't come before start time. If you have someone entering their total hours in a decimal field, you'd need to put a constraint on that to prevent someone from volunteering 800 hours in a day instead of 8.00.

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