Hourwell for Zendesk: documentation

Hourwell counts working time on any ticket condition you choose and has Zendesk act when a deadline nears or passes. It is built for internal deadlines: operational level agreements (OLAs) between teams, pickup times, time with a team, time on hold. It does not measure customer reply times. Support: hello@greatwork.company (reply within one business day).

Set up a timer

1. Open Hourwell in the left bar (admins edit; everyone can view).
2. Under Timers, pick a template: Pickup by a team, Time with a team (OLA), On-hold too long or Escalation response.
3. Runs while (all of these): the conditions that must all hold for the clock to run. You can use the status, a custom ticket status, the group, whether the ticket has an assignee, priority, type, form, brand, a tag being on or off the ticket, and ticket fields (drop-down, checkbox, text and number fields).
4. Pauses while (any of these): while one of these holds, the clock stops without ending the stint, for example "Status is Pending".
5. Goal and Warn this many minutes before: in working time on the chosen calendar.
6. Start over each time (each stint has its own clock, for "pickup within 2 hours every time the ticket comes back") or Add up every stint (one total, for "no more than 16 hours with Engineering in all").
7. Actions for the warning and for the breach: email the assignee, the ticket's group, another group or an agent; move the ticket to a group or agent; set priority, status or a field; add or remove tags. Emails can use {{ticket.id}}, {{ticket.title}} and {{ticket.link}}.
8. Save timer. Hourwell creates its Zendesk triggers for the timer.

Timers start on tickets as they change. To time unsolved tickets that already match, click Start on open tickets on the timer: Hourwell marks up to 1,000 of them and rebuilds each clock from the ticket's own history over the next few minutes.

Calendars

Two calendars come ready: Business hours (Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00) and 24/7, in the time zone of the admin who first opened Hourwell. Edit them or add more under Calendars: a time zone such as America/Chicago, working hours per day (several ranges for a lunch break, for example 9:00-12:00, 13:00-17:30), and holidays, one per line (2026-12-25 Christmas (every year)). Daylight saving is handled.

What agents see

• Ticket sidebar: each timer that applies to the ticket, with its state (Running, Due soon, Paused, Overdue, Met, Missed), the time left or overdue, a progress bar, when it is due in the agent's own time zone, and the next armed deadline.
• Timers running (the Hourwell page): every running, paused or overdue timer on unsolved tickets, most urgent first, with filters for overdue, due within an hour and my tickets.
• A pop-up in Zendesk when a timer on one of your tickets goes overdue.
• The "Hourwell: overdue timers" and "Hourwell: tickets with timers" views.

How clocks are counted

Each clock is rebuilt from the ticket's history (its audit log), so it is exact even when the ticket changed while nobody had Zendesk open. A stint starts when all "runs while" conditions start to hold and ends when one stops holding; time counts only inside the calendar and only while no pause condition holds. A timer that passes its goal while running is overdue; when the stint ends it is Met or Missed. A missed stint leaves the tag hourwell_missed_<timer id> on the ticket for views and reports.

When deadlines fire

• While anyone with Hourwell has Zendesk open: within a minute of the deadline in the session of the ticket's assignee (or, for an unassigned ticket, of someone in its group), and within about 4 minutes in anyone else's session.
• With nobody signed in: Hourwell arms each ticket's next deadline for Zendesk's own hourly automations ("Hourwell: unattended deadline check", installed with the app, and the "daily safety net"). Automations run once an hour, so an unattended warning or breach comes after the deadline, never before: usually within an hour or two, and within a few hours for a deadline more than half a day away. Timers on a 24/7 calendar are armed by their start trigger the moment they start, even when nobody is signed in. Business-hours timers rarely reach a deadline while the team is away, because their clock stops too.
• If something a timer reads changes while armed (for example the ticket goes Pending), an Hourwell trigger disarms it at once, so an unattended action never fires on a ticket that paused.
• Zendesk automations act on at most 1,000 tickets an hour and never on closed tickets.

What Hourwell creates in your Zendesk

Hourwell repairs its own triggers if someone edits or deletes them (an admin opening Hourwell, or Apply rules now on the Setup tab). Do not edit them by hand; change the timer instead.

Plan and billing

Standard: $3 per agent per month, every feature, no cap on timers. 14-day trial; Zendesk asks for a card at install and bills monthly through Stripe when the trial ends unless you uninstall.

Data

Hourwell runs in your browser inside Zendesk and calls only your Zendesk account, as the signed-in agent. Timer definitions live in the app's settings in your Zendesk; each ticket's clock snapshot lives in an Hourwell ticket field. It reads ticket history only to compute clocks and never keeps comment text. Nothing is sent to Great Work LLC; no AI is used. See the privacy policy at https://greatwork.company/apps/hourwell/privacy.

Troubleshooting

• A breach fired later than the deadline overnight: nobody with Hourwell had Zendesk open, so Zendesk's hourly automations fired it (see When deadlines fire).
• A timer did not start on an older ticket: use Start on open tickets on that timer.
• The Setup tab says rules need updating: someone changed an Hourwell trigger; an admin clicks Apply rules now.
• Light agents cannot edit tickets, so their sessions do not fire deadlines; others' do.