Flow: Start/Stop Time Collector

Time collectors in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central let you track time spent on tasks. The Start-Stop Time Collector flow gives you a fast way to find a running time collector and stop it without navigating through the full time collector list.

You start a flow, select a running time collector, click next, and stop it. The stopped time then waits to be processed.

The flow page shows limited information and no menu. The full Time Collectors page includes extra functionality that you may want to restrict to managers only.

What the Start-Stop Time Collector flow does

The Start-Stop Time Collector flow is a quick way to get into your running time collectors and stop them. When you click Start-Stop Time Collectors, you can select from your open time collectors the ones that are currently running. For example, one might have been running for one hour and seven minutes.

To stop it, you select the time collector and click next. The flow then suggests stopping it, and you confirm. If you look into your time collectors afterwards, you can see the time collector has stopped, for instance at one hour and 15 minutes, now waiting to be processed.

There is a related flow called Start-Stop Job Task that works in a similar way. You can move through that flow to find an existing task you are working on and then stop it. In most cases, though, you would use the Start-Stop Time Collectors flow.

Running the flow from the time collectors list

You can also run the same start-stop functionality directly from the Time Collectors list, since the list includes start-stop actions as well. This means there are two ways to reach the same result: through the dedicated Start-Stop Time Collectors flow, or from within the Time Collectors page itself.

The difference in menus and access rights

The two routes are not identical, and the difference matters for access control.

When you open Start-Stop Time Collectors through the lookup, you get a simple page with limited information and no menu. This page only shows what you need to start or stop a time collector.

When you open the full Time Collectors page, you get different functionality that not all users should have access to. For that reason, the full Time Collectors page might be intended only for managers, and some users might not have access to those extra actions.

What this means for setting up access

If you want to give regular users a quick way to stop their running time, point them to the Start-Stop Time Collectors flow with its simple page. Reserve the full Time Collectors page for managers who need the broader set of actions. This keeps everyday users out of functionality that does not concern them, while still letting them manage their own running time.

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