Time tracking

If you bill by the hour, or you just want to know where your team's time actually goes, TLDTrack tracks it against the work itself. Start a timer on a job, stop it when you are done, and the minutes (and, if you have set rates, the money) roll up to the card, the client and a timesheet you can export. No separate stopwatch app, no reconstructing the week from memory on a Friday.

Running a timer

The everyday way to track time is the timer. Open a job card, and against any checklist step you can start a timer with one click. While it runs, a pill in the dashboard header shows what you are timing, so you never forget it is going. Click stop and the elapsed time is written against that step and the card.

One rule keeps it honest: you can only have one timer running at a time. Starting a timer on a new step automatically stops whichever one you had going, so your time is never double-counted across two jobs at once. If you had a timer running, switching to another job closes the first cleanly.

Rates: turning minutes into money

Time on its own is useful; time priced is billable. Each team member can have an hourly rate set on their membership of your organisation. When a timer stops, TLDTrack takes the minutes elapsed and the rate that applies to you at that moment and records a frozen value on the entry.

Freezing matters. Because the value is stored on the entry when it is logged, changing someone's rate later never silently rewrites the value of work they already did. Old entries keep the rate they were logged at; only new time uses the new rate. If no rate is set for a person, their time is still tracked in minutes, it simply carries no monetary value.

Logging time after the fact

Not all work happens at your desk with a timer running. A phone call, a chat at a client's office, an evening fix. For those you can log time manually against a step or a card. Enter the duration in whatever form is natural:

• Plain minutes, such as 90.
• Hours and minutes, such as 1h 30m or 1:30.
• Decimal hours, such as 2.5 hours.
• Even natural phrases like half an hour or quarter hour.

You can say when the work happened, so the entry lands on the right day, and a single entry is capped at 24 hours to catch typos (split anything longer into separate entries). Manually logged time is frozen at your rate and rolls up exactly like a timer would, so the two are interchangeable in every total.

Fixed-fee expenses

Sometimes what you need to bill is not time at all but a cost: a plugin licence, a stock image, a hosting reimbursement. You can add these as fixed-fee lines against a card. An expense carries a value directly, with no duration and no hourly rate, and it sits alongside the time entries so a card's billable total reflects both the hours worked and the costs incurred.

Where the time adds up

Every entry rolls upward automatically:

• To the checklist step it was logged against, as actual minutes.
• To the whole job card, so you can compare estimated against actual time and see the card's total billable value.
• To the client and the team member, on the timesheet.

A card can also carry an estimate, so as the actual time builds up you can see at a glance whether a job is running to plan or over. Time logged against a card marked billable is what feeds an invoice line: the billable value can seed the amount when you turn a completed job into an invoice, which you then adjust and mark off.

The timesheet

Pulling it all together is the timesheet, a view of every completed time entry across your organisation for a date range. It gives you:

• Flexible ranges, today, yesterday, this or last week, this or last month, or a custom span.
• Filters, by team member, by client, and a billable-only toggle.
• Totals per person, how many minutes each member logged, how much of it was billable, and its value.
• Totals per job, time and value grouped by card, with its invoice state, so you can see what has been billed.
• CSV export, the full breakdown, ready to drop into a spreadsheet or hand to whoever raises the invoices.

Tracking time, step by step

1. 1
   Make sure each chargeable team member has an hourly rate set on their membership, so time turns into value automatically.
2. 2
   Open a job card in the agency workspace and mark it billable if it is chargeable work.
3. 3
   Start a timer on the checklist step you are working on. Do the work. Stop it when you are done, or switch to another step and this one stops itself.
4. 4
   For work that happened away from the timer, log it manually with a duration and the day it happened. Add any fixed-fee expenses as lines too.
5. 5
   At billing time, open the timesheet, filter to the client and period, check the billable totals, and export or carry them into your invoice.

Good to know

• Only one timer runs per person at a time; starting a new one stops the old one, so time never overlaps.
• Value is frozen at the rate in force when the entry is logged. Later rate changes do not rewrite past work.
• People without an hourly rate still have their minutes tracked; they just carry no monetary value.
• Manual entries and timer entries are treated identically in every total, so mix and match freely.
• Expenses let a card's billable figure include costs as well as hours.
• Time tracking is part of the Agency CRM. It is included on the Agency plan and is a paid add-on on Starter and Pro.

Where to track time