Time tracking

How the hours get captured

This is the fork in the category: manual entry, a start-stop timer, calendar reconstruction, or automatic capture from activity.

Automatic capture produces more data and more resistance from the people being tracked. Decide where your team sits before shortlisting, because the wrong answer here fails on adoption, not on features.

Monitoring is a separate decision

Some tools take screenshots, log applications and score productivity. Others deliberately do not.

Where employee monitoring is regulated, this is a legal question before it is a product one. Check what gets collected, whether it can be switched off per team, and what the worker can see about their own data.

Billing, if that is the point

For agencies the value is downstream: billable rates per person or project, rounding rules, approval before invoicing, and a clean export to the accounting tool.

A tool that tracks time beautifully and exports badly costs you the time it saves.

What to check in a trial

Track one real week, then run the report you would actually send a client or a payroll provider.

Look for rounding surprises, entries missing from mobile, and whether editing a past entry leaves an audit trail.