An estimate is the planned effort on a ticket, stored as a whole number of minutes. It is an internal figure for the team: workspace users see and set it; client users never see it, not even when elevated. SAQ has no story points, no remaining-effort field, and no capacity planning; the estimate is one number that reports compare with logged time.
How it relates to other concepts
- Only leaf tickets carry an estimate. A ticket with children has none of its own and shows "(sum of children)": the roll-up of every descendant the viewer may see, through the parent links described in ticket links.
- Reports show an Estimate column next to logged minutes; grouping by ticket rolls estimates up through visible ancestors and marks rows that include descendants.
- Estimates never affect billing. What a client pays comes from time entries, rates, and policies.
Rules
- In the app, write the estimate as
1h30,90, or45m. Through the API, send whole minutes. - Setting an estimate on a parent ticket is refused: "A parent ticket has no estimate of its own; it is the sum of its children."
- Who may set it: Owners and Admins, any workspace user on an Inbox ticket, and full project members. Elevated client users cannot set it, and a regular client user's value on a new ticket is ignored.
- Because the roll-up only counts descendants the viewer can see, two workspace users with different project memberships can see different sums on the same parent.
- Setting an estimate is a Staff-audience timeline event.
Example
ACME-120 Gift card launch has three children estimated at 4h, 6h, and 2h. The parent shows 12h (sum of children). After the launch the report groups by ticket and shows 12h estimated against 14h 30m logged.