If you want to run reports on any fields in the DB then you would probably need to invest in something like: Crystal Report Writer. I highly doubt that osTicket will ever come with anything as extensive as by field reporting.  There are other products that do that sort of thing.

I am also interested in the ability to track time spent on an issue, but I would like to sum the time spent by client or client company and have that total subtracted from a pre-purchased block of support hours.

We had been using the mod by tpope found here:  http://forum.osticket.com/d/discussion//mod-simple-time-spent-on-ticket  which was a rewrite of fidel's 1.6 mod. This worked out very well.However, now I need to get the time tracking working before we can finish the upgrade to 1.8.My thoughts this evening are to build a custom form that adds a few fields to each entry, such as time spent field, Onsite checkbox, Parts used? field, etc., but I haven't thought it through all the way yet.I want to use the custom form approach, because I think that it will allow upgrading to later versions to be easier.Thoughts?

There is a mod for 1.7 that may work in 1.8, http://www.forum.osticket.com/d/discussion//mod-time-duration-in-each-message

@[deleted]: Yeah, I've had that tab open for a few days.  My staff is clamoring for us to move to 1.8, especially for the user lookup features, but until we can track time, we're still using our 1.7 version.If I could figure out how to add a custom form to each ticket note/reply/transfer/assign/update, that would be the best solution, because that would also allow us to implement the other requested features from our 2013 Q4 strategy meeting in one go.I don't care about summation, as the bookkeeper has to go in and copy each note into our billing system anyway.  But if we could include a custom form into the ticket update section with a few checkboxes and a short answer for time, that would rock our world.  Unfortunately, I'm just not enough of a coder.

Add a field to the thread table to save the amount. It's possible. Add an input field to the staff view, I believe it's in /include/staff/ticket-view.php

Might take a bit of figuring out. Seems other people want a similar feature though, so is worth doing.