Track investment to priorities

Overview

Socratic helps you understand how time and resources are being spent across your projects, teams, and initiatives. Ask any question about where time was spent for a given period, and receive detailed insights with interactive visualizations.

Socratic analyzes the time work tickets spend in active states to answer questions about:

How worked time is distributed by type or body of work (e.g. epic), label, custom fields, projects, teams, or people.
Labor costs based on time spent (optional)
Resource allocation trends over time

How it works

For work time to register, the ticket must have:

An assignee (i.e., the ticket cannot have been unassigned);
Time worked. Meaning, if an issue moves directly from backlog to done, with no time in an active status, it is not counted toward allocation.

To calculate time worked, we're interested only in issues that spent time in an active work status for the calendar period you select. If issues have worked time prior to the calendar period you select, we exclude that portion of worked time from the results.

For example, say you pick a calendar period of the past 14 days. We will show all time spent on issues that were active during that period. This includes both still-active issues, as well as any completed issues (provided the completed issues spent time in at least one active phase). Any time spent on those issues prior to the past 14 days (in this example) would not be included.

Regarding time allocation for labels and custom fields, note that:

Any labels assigned to a parent entity (e.g. an epic) are automatically inherited by the child issues. So, if an epic with the label of "Customer" has ten child issues, any work on those issues would appear against the "Customer" label in Allocation.
If a label or enabled custom field doesn't appear in the filter for a particular time period, it's because we observed no worked time against issues with that label / custom field.
The time worked across labels may sum to greater than 100 percent. This is because issues may be assigned more than one label, in which case the total worked time for the issue is allocated to each label.

Setting labor costs

You may also optionally define labor costs to see, for example, how much money has been invested to-date in a given epic or type of work.

To set labor cost, click Settings in the left-hand nav and choose Cost Roles. When setting labor cost, you have two options:

A default cost that applies to all contributors;
The creation of cost roles, which may then be assigned to contributors individually.

To assign cost roles to contributors, choose the People tab on the Settings page, and then choose the Contributors button.

If no cost role is assigned to a contributor, we use the default cost value.

Is weekend time included?

In a word, yes. This is because time allocation is about relative share. Consider:

If you're dividing a person's time across tickets/projects, what matters is the ratio: how much of their tracked time was spent on Ticket A vs Ticket B.
Whether the denominator is "120 hours (5×8h)" or "168 hours (7×24h)" doesn't change the relative shares — it just rescales them. Example:
- Ticket A = 30h, Ticket B = 70h.
- Allocation = 30% vs 70%, regardless of whether you measure within weekdays only or all calendar days.

There are a few other reasons for including weekend time:

Simplicity and consistency
- Counting calendar time (24/7) avoids having to model holidays, weekends, and personal schedules (which vary by team, country, or individual).
- Everyone is measured against the same, objective "clock," so you don't need to constantly maintain calendars or working hours rules.
The "waiting cost" is real, even on weekends
- If a ticket is "In Progress" from Friday to Monday, from a business perspective the system (and potentially the customer) experienced a 2.5-day delay.
- Including weekends better reflects elapsed time and thus opportunity cost — which can be important if allocation is meant to capture both work effort and system throughput.
Alignment with throughput and flow metrics
- In Lean/Agile, metrics like cycle time and lead time almost always include weekends, because the system doesn't stop waiting just because people aren't working.
- This makes your allocation analysis compatible with those higher-level flow metrics.
Cost-based allocation is usually calendar-driven
- If you're doing cost allocation (e.g., person's salary → distributed across tickets), weekends don't distort relative allocation because cost accrues continuously, not just during 9–5.
- Salaries are paid monthly/yearly, not only for weekdays, so including calendar time maps naturally to real cost allocation.

Types of questions you can ask

Time distribution questions

"What percentage of Sarah's time was allocated to bugs last quarter"
"Show me time allocation by project for Q2"

Cost analysis questions

"What was the cost breakdown by epic last quarter?"
"How much did we spend on the mobile app epic this month?"

Resource planning questions

"Which epics had the most time worked this quarter?"
"How much time did we spend on work labeled Tech Debt?"
"How much time did we spend on bugs for the past month?"

Team and individual analysis

"How much time did each team spend on work labeled Customer for the past quarter"
"Show me where the Design team spent its time by issue type last quarter"
"How much time did Juan spend by epic this month?"

Comparison questions

"Show me time spent by label last month"
"Show me time spent by project last month"
"Show me time spent by issue type last month"

Capabilities & usage

Specify time ranges

You can ask about different time periods:

Specific dates: "from January 1 to March 31"
Relative periods: "last month", "this quarter", "past 6 weeks"
Predefined periods: "Q1 2024", "December 2023"

Filter by different dimensions

You can filter your analysis by:

Project
Issue type
Label
Epic
Team
Person
Initiative
Custom field

Group results in different ways

Ask for breakdowns by:

Issue types (e.g. Bug, Story, etc.)
Initiatives
Projects
Epics
Labels
People
Teams

Specify allocation type

You can see the data multiple ways

Percentage - shows time breakdowns as a percentage of time
Issue count - shows time breakdowns by count of issues
Days shows time in person days
Cost - shows time as function of costs (if defined in Socratic)

Reading the results

Socratic provides a natural language summary of your allocation data, highlighting key insights and trends. The agent also provides interactive visualizations.

Depending on your question, you'll see:

Allocation sheet (Detail tab)

Detailed breakdown table showing exact numbers
Includes time (days), percentages, costs, and task counts
Shows which people worked on each item

Trend chart (Trend tab)

Line chart showing allocation patterns over time
Compares current period with previous 5 periods
Different metrics: time, percentage, cost, or task count

Metrics Explained

Time Days: Actual days of work allocated
Percentage: Portion of total time spent (useful for understanding priorities)
Cost: Dollar amount based on daily rates and time spent
Task Count: Number of individual issues/tickets worked on
People: List of team members who contributed

Best practices

1. Be specific about time ranges

✅ "Show time allocation by project for January 2024"
❌ "Show recent allocation" (too vague)

2. Specify what you want to group by

✅ "Break down time by project for the engineering team for the past month"
❌ "Show me time data" (unclear grouping)

3. Use exact names when possible

✅ "Show me time spent on Project Alpha last month"
✅ "How was Sarah Johnson's time allocation by issue type last month"
❌ "That project we discussed"

4. Combine filters for precise analysis

✅ "Show me the Engineering's team time on bugs last month"
✅ "How much did we spend on the Mobile epic by person in Q2"

Common use cases

Software capitalization
Budget analysis
Client reporting