Time Tracking

Definition

Time tracking is the practice of recording how employees' working hours are spent: on which tasks, projects, clients or activities, and for how long. Where attendance management records that someone worked, time tracking records what they worked on. The output is a set of worklogs or timesheets that feed billing, capacity planning, cost accounting and, for hourly staff, payroll.

It is used differently by different organizations. Professional services firms track time to invoice clients. Product companies track it to understand where engineering effort goes. Operations teams track it to plan capacity and justify headcount. Public and regulated bodies track it because funding or compliance requires it.

Why organizations track time

• Billing. Hours are the unit of sale in consulting, agencies, law and accounting; untracked hours are unbilled revenue.
• Capacity planning. Knowing how long recurring work actually takes is the only reliable basis for staffing decisions and delivery estimates.
• Cost and profitability. Time per project or client turns labour cost into project cost and shows which work is worth doing.
• Payroll accuracy. For hourly or overtime-eligible staff, tracked time is pay.
• Compliance and funding. Grants, government contracts and some regulations require documented hours.
• Workload visibility. Sustained over-recording on one person or team is an early signal of overload.

Methods of tracking time

• Timers.

The employee starts and stops a clock against a task. Most accurate, most intrusive, and the method that fails first if the tool is slow or hard to reach.

• Manual worklogs.

Hours are entered against tasks or projects at the end of the day or week. Less precise, far less friction, and adequate for most planning and billing purposes if entered regularly.

• Schedule-based.

Planned allocations are assumed unless corrected. Suited to stable, repeatable work.

• Automatic capture.

Software records application or activity use and proposes entries. Efficient but raises privacy and trust questions that many organizations decide are not worth it.

The right method is the one people will actually use. A weekly worklog that is filled in beats a precise timer that is not.

What a useful time record contains

A worklog entry needs a person, a date, a duration, and the thing the time was spent on, expressed in the organization's own structure: project, client, task, initiative or cost centre. It should carry an approval state where hours drive billing or pay, and it should be reportable by every one of those dimensions, because the value of time data is almost entirely in the aggregate: hours per project this month, utilization per team this quarter, actual against estimate per initiative.

Time data becomes far more useful when the tasks and projects it references are the ones people already work in. When the time tracker is a separate tool with its own project list, entries drift into vague categories and the reports stop meaning anything.

Time tracking and related terms

• Attendance management:

Records presence, start and end times, lateness and absence. Time tracking records what the hours contained. Payroll typically needs both.

• Timesheets:

The periodic (usually weekly) summary of tracked time submitted for approval.

• Utilization:

The share of available hours spent on billable or planned work, calculated from time tracking.

• Project and resource planning:

Uses tracked time as the actuals against which plans and capacity are checked.

Introducing time tracking without resistance

• Say what the data is for, and use it for that. Time tracking introduced as a planning tool and then used for surveillance is abandoned within months.
• Keep entry short. Under a minute a day, from the tools people already have open, including a phone.
• Track at the level you will report on. If nobody will look at task-level data, ask for project-level entries.
• Show people their own data. Employees who can see their week are more careful about it than those who submit into a void.
• Review the reports in the open. Capacity and utilization discussions that reference the data are what make the entry effort feel worthwhile.

Time tracking in Spark.work

In Spark.work, worklogs and timesheets sit in the same platform as tasks, projects, initiatives and attendance, so time is logged against the work people are already managing there rather than against a separate project list. Employees log time on web or mobile; timesheets go through approval flows; managers see submissions waiting for review; and reports show hours by project, team or initiative for billing, capacity planning and payroll. Because attendance, leave and timesheets share one record, an employee's day is never reconciled across three systems.