How Do I Set Up Drive Time and Non-Billable Hours in Protiv?

Why Does This Matter?

Your crews don't spend every hour of the day on billable job work. They drive to job sites, load trucks, work in the shop, and handle admin tasks. All of that time gets logged — and if Protiv doesn't know which hours are overhead, it counts all of it against your job budgets.

When that happens, jobs look over budget even when crews performed well, and bonuses shrink or disappear for the wrong reasons.

This setting tells Protiv which time is real production work and which isn't — so your incentives stay accurate and your crews get paid fairly.

The Two Settings — What Each One Does

There are two separate controls that work together:

LMN, QuickBooks Time, and Jobber Users

How to get there

Settings → Jobs → Allocation of Non-Billable Time and Drive Time → + Add Rule

This opens the Add Non-Billable Allocation Rule screen.

Step 1 — Choose how you want to identify overhead time

You'll see three options:

• Service — use this when the overhead time is tied to a recurring service type (e.g., a "Shop Time" service)
• Job — use this when the overhead time is tied to a specific job (e.g., an internal travel job, a loading job)
• Client — use this when an entire client's jobs are non-billable overhead

Select the one that matches how your overhead time is structured in your system, then click + Add Services, + Add Jobs, or + Add Clients to select the specific targets.

Step 2 — Decide whether to distribute drive time

Once you've selected your target type, you'll see a checkbox:

"Distribute drive time across selected [Services / Jobs / Clients]"

• Check this box if you want that overhead time redistributed proportionally across all jobs the worker worked that day. This gives you better job costing because the travel cost gets assigned to the real production jobs it supported, not just absorbed as a gap.
• Leave it unchecked if you only want the overhead excluded from the billable pool, without pushing it onto other jobs.

Step 3 — Save the rule

Click Save Rule.

The rule takes effect immediately and applies account-wide across all active jobs. There is no undo prompt — review your selection carefully before saving.

Step 4 — Set Drive Time for Incentives

Once your rules are saved, go to Settings → Jobs → Drive Time for Incentives and choose whether drive-flagged time should be included or excluded from the labor cost side of ProPay calculations.

QBT and Jobber users: Neither connector sends a drive time flag on sync. The Drive Time for Incentives toggle only has an effect once you have distribution rules enabled, those rules are what generate the drive-flagged rows in Protiv that the toggle acts on. Set up your rules first, then configure the toggle.