foxxcyber/docsLabor & volunteer hours
Log hours against the job they belong to, valued from the crew roster, then turn documented volunteer time into grant-matching evidence.
Hours are logged where the work happened — on a work order, on an inspection, or on an excursion — and every entry belongs to exactly one of those three. There is no free-floating timesheet, because an hour that is not attached to a job cannot be evidence of anything later.
Planning is kept apart from this. The hours you put on a run before it has run are planned hours, and the days people put on the work-day schedule are plans too. Neither appears in the labor totals or the volunteer report. A run's hours are booked when the run is closed out — see Excursions & runs.
Logging an entry
A work order and an inspection carry the same short form: pick the Person, set the Date and the Hours (up to 24 in one entry), add an optional note on a work order, and click Log hours. On a run, each crew member's hours are typed beside their name on the run's Crew card, and anyone else who worked it goes under Others on this run.
The form does not ask whether the hours are volunteer, paid, or contractor, or what they are worth. Both come from the person's labor terms on the crew roster — their kind of labor and their hourly rate, or the Independent Sector volunteer rate for the year when no rate is set. Each entry is stamped with the rate in force on the day it was logged, so a later raise never rewrites past hours. The person picker shows each name with the terms their hours will be logged at. See Crew & qualifications.
Every hours list then shows two totals, kept apart on purpose:
- Paid labor — paid staff and contractor hours at their rates. This is cash, and it is what counts toward the cost of a work order, a locomotive, or a run.
- Volunteer time — volunteer hours at their rate, shown as in-kind value. It is never added into a cost.
If the hours cannot be used, nothing is logged and a sentence beside the form says why. A wrong entry on an open work order can be corrected or removed from its Edit link; see Work orders.
The shop-wide view
Labor shows the railroad's hours and their value across work orders, inspections, and runs for a date range. Set From and To and click Apply. You get Total hours, Total value — split into paid and volunteer (in-kind) — and the number of Entries, then two breakdowns: By person (person, hours, value, entries) and By locomotive (locomotive, hours, value), with run hours shared across the locomotives that ran.
A person's own roster page carries the same figures for them alone, with every entry listed and linked back to the work order, inspection, or run it came from. A crew member with a login sees their own hours across every railroad on My Career.
Volunteer hours and grant matching
Click Volunteer hours (grants) → from the Labor page. Out of the box the report is for administrators; an administrator can open it to general members on Settings & permissions.
This report exists because of 2 CFR 200.306: documented volunteer labor can count toward the matching funds on a federal grant, provided it is verifiable from the organization's own records. For a heritage railroad, that is often the difference between being able to accept an award and not.
Set the date range and click Run report. You get:
- Volunteers — how many people contributed hours in the period.
- Volunteer hours — the total, drawn from work orders, inspections, and runs.
- In-kind value — the dollar figure, with the national rate it cites.
How an hour is valued
Each volunteer hour is valued at the rate stamped on it when it was logged: the volunteer's own hourly rate from their crew record when one is set — a documented market rate for a skilled volunteer, with a rate basis saying where it came from, "BLS boilermaker median, 2026" for example — or otherwise the national Independent Sector value of volunteer time for the year the work was done.
The report prints the wording to quote in an application, naming both the national rate and the 2 CFR 200.306(b) basis for valuing skilled labor at market rates.
Set a skilled volunteer's hourly rate and its basis on their crew record before they log their hours. The rate is stamped on each entry when it is logged, and a machinist's hours valued at the generic volunteer rate understate the match considerably.
The breakdowns
By person lists each volunteer with their roles, hours, the rate applied, the rate basis, and the resulting value — the basis column being the part a grant reviewer will look at. By locomotive / project attributes hours and value to assets, with labor logged against an excursion split across the locomotives that ran it.
A separate line reports paid and contract labor in the same period, because funders generally want total project cost alongside the in-kind contribution.
Certifying a report
Certify this report freezes the period, its parameters, and its totals with your signature. That frozen record is the supervisor attestation the grant documentation is asking for, and it is protected the same way as every other record in RailCompliant — see How your data is protected. Certifying is always an administrator's action: if your railroad lets other members view this report, they see "An organization admin certifies this report" in place of the button. Use Print / Save as PDF for the copy that goes in the application file.
Exporting the raw activity
The entry-level log — dates, people, kinds, activities, applied rates and bases — exports as CSV from Export Data as Volunteer hours (grant evidence), each entry valued at the rate stamped on it. That file is the verifiable record 2 CFR 200.306 asks for, and it is what you hand over if the hours are ever queried.