Time tracked on the work, not reconstructed on a Friday
A timer starts on the record somebody is working on, which is what makes the total mean something later. Time is measured in man-days, one man-day is four hours, and a project sold with a contracted total gets a tab that reads used against sold.
Three ways a timesheet stops being evidence
Nobody remembers Tuesday, so the week is rounded into shapes that look plausible.
One forgotten timer overnight and the project total is quietly nonsense.
The contracted days ran out three weeks before anyone opened the spreadsheet.
Start it where the work is
Tasks, issues and feature or change requests can be tracked. Personal tasks and untriaged client requests cannot, because neither is contracted project work. Start the timer from the item and a pill follows you around the app with the running clock and what it belongs to, so you never go back to the record to check.
Starting a second timer stops the first and tells you what it recorded. Entries are saved rounded to the nearest minute, and under a minute is treated as a misclick and saved as nothing.
- One timer at a time, stopped in a single click from the header
- Log time after the fact by duration, or by a start and an end in your own time zone
- At least a minute, at most twelve hours, never in the future, never backdated past 30 days
Export button does nothing on Safari
A forgotten timer closes itself, and counts for nothing
Six hours is the ceiling for a timer started in the app, and a tab that goes quiet for half an hour is closed back to the last moment it was known to be there rather than the moment somebody noticed. A timer an agent starts gets two hours, because there is no open tab to vouch for it.
Either way the entry is marked as needing review. It sits in My Time with an amber edge and the reason it was closed, and it counts towards nothing until somebody confirms it, corrects it or deletes it.
- Anything unconfirmed past 48 hours is flagged and has its own filter
- Confirm a whole day in one click, or correct the times first
- Days follow the company timezone, so a late night lands on the day it started
My Time · needs review
Used against sold, with alerts that fire once
A project with a contracted man-day total gets a Time tab: what has been used against what was sold, a budget meter, and the split by record and by person. Alerts go out once each at 80, 90 and 100 percent, to recipients configured per threshold.
Nothing is ever blocked. Time past the contract sits in its own overage segment with a button for an admin to acknowledge it, which is a record that somebody saw it rather than a gate on anybody's work.
- Only counted time is in the figures: a running timer is not, and neither is an unconfirmed entry
- The same tab shows how much of the project went on rework, from the causes recorded at close
- Where there is a maintenance agreement, this month's time reads against the monthly allowance
A project total, and never a person
Client visibility is a toggle on the project, off by default. Turned on, the portal shows a total in man-days to two decimals and a rollup across the records it went on, with the reference and title of each.
It is never broken down by who did the work, and records internal to the delivery team get no line, so the lines need not add up to the total. That is the honest shape of the figure, and the portal says so rather than implying otherwise.
- One toggle per project, so sharing is a decision rather than a default
- A man-day is four working hours, so 12.75 md reads as 51 hours
- The cost on a maintenance record is never shown to a client
12.75 md across 9 records
Never per person · internal records get no line
The things teams ask about this
Why man-days rather than hours?
Because delivery is sold in days and worked in minutes, and one unit has to win. A man-day is four working hours, so 12.75 md is 51 hours. Timers and manual entries are taken in hours and minutes and shown in both, and contracted totals, monthly allowances and client-facing figures are all in man-days so they can be compared to what was quoted.
Can somebody bill time to a record the client raised?
Not to the request itself. Untriaged client requests and private personal tasks cannot carry time, because neither is contracted project work. Once a request is sorted into an issue or a feature or change request, that record takes time like any task does, which keeps the total made of work that was actually agreed.
Why is a project total lower than the work I know happened?
Almost always because something is waiting for review. Only counted time reaches the figures: a timer still running is not in them, and an entry the safety layer closed on its own stays out until a person confirms or corrects it. My Time is where that is cleared, and anything sitting there past 48 hours is flagged.
Does hitting the contracted total stop anyone working?
No, and it is not meant to. Alerts fire at 80, 90 and 100 percent, once each, and past the contract the extra time is kept in its own overage bucket for an admin to acknowledge. Acknowledging is a record that somebody saw it. Nothing was ever blocked, and nothing is unblocked by it.
Where this connects to the rest of it
See it against your own work
Thirty minutes on a call, one of your real client projects on the screen, and an honest answer about whether this part of the product earns its place in how you work.
partnerships@dhcertainty.com