Time tracking: what it has to deliver to be worth the effort
Recording hours costs a few minutes every day and often returns nothing. Why that happens - and what tracking has to deliver before it pays for itself.
Last updated: 15 July 2026
Time tracking has a poor reputation in many businesses, and it is deserved. It costs every person a few minutes a day, it produces arguments about breaks, and at the end of the month there are numbers nobody looks at.
If that is the balance, tracking really is waste. But the reason is not that time is being recorded. The reason is what is being recorded.
Attendance or work: the distinction that matters
There are two ways to record hours, and in daily use they look almost identical.
Attendance: who was there and when. In, out, break. This answers questions about payroll and working-time compliance.
Work: who spent how long on what. This answers questions about costing.
Both are legitimate. But only the second gives anything back commercially. Record eight hours of attendance and at year end you know wages were paid. Record the same eight hours split across three projects and you know which of them made money.
The extra effort is perhaps thirty seconds a day. The difference in what you learn is everything.
Why time tracking fails in practice
Almost always for the same three reasons.
Too much friction. If someone has to log in, fill out a form and find the right entry in a list of sixty projects, they will not do it during the work. They will do it on Friday afternoon from memory. And what comes from memory is guessed.
It feels like surveillance. When tracking is introduced without explaining why, the obvious assumption is that it is about who works how much. That creates resistance, and the resistance does not show up as protest - it shows up as inaccurate numbers.
It leads nowhere. The most powerful reason of all. If nobody ever discusses the recorded figures, everyone learns that they do not matter. Tracking with no visible consequence decays within months.
What good time tracking has to deliver
It happens in the moment, not afterwards. At the end of a task, not at the end of the week. Anything else is reconstruction.
It asks for very little. Project, duration, done. Every additional mandatory field lowers participation. Categories, activity types and cost centres can be added later if they turn out to be genuinely needed - usually they do not.
It is where the work is. Someone on a site does not open a laptop. Someone between two meetings wants three taps, not three clicks. If tracking does not work on a phone, it does not work at all for part of the workforce.
And it produces something visible. This is the point that decides whether it survives. When recorded hours show up in the project view, when someone says «we are at 70 per cent of the costed time», then tracking has a purpose everyone can see. Then it gets maintained.
What project-level time tracking gives you
You see a project running over while it is still running. That is the difference between acting and observing. At 70 per cent of the time and half the work delivered, you can still talk to the client. After sign-off you cannot.
You cost the next proposal better. Knowing that a particular piece of work averages 14 hours rather than 10 changes what you quote. That number only comes from recorded data, not from experience - experience remembers the good cases.
You find out how much time is not billable. Usually more than assumed, and it is the figure that determines your hourly rate. Without it you are costing in the dark.
And you can evidence extra work. «That took us three hours more» is a claim. Three recorded hours with a date are evidence.
Is time tracking a legal requirement?
For employees' working time: broadly yes. For attaching those hours to a project: no - that part is voluntary and purely commercial.
Obligations around working-time records have tightened in recent years. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that member states must require employers to have a system for recording daily working time; Germany's Federal Labour Court followed in 2022, deriving such an obligation from existing law.
What that means in detail - form, deadlines, exemptions for particular groups - differs considerably between Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is in parts still moving. Anyone who needs to know what applies to their own business should settle it with their accountant.
The practical point for costing is a different one: the legally required record is an attendance record. It satisfies an obligation, but it answers no commercial question. If you have to record anyway, take the small extra step and attach the hours to a project - then an obligation turns into something useful.
How to introduce time tracking
Explain the purpose before introducing the tool. One sentence is enough: we want to know which projects pay off. Not: we want to know who works how long. That difference affects data quality more than any software does.
Start with one level. Project only, no activity types. If somebody asks after three months what the hours went into in detail, add the second level then. Not before.
And talk about the numbers. Once a month, five minutes, one project. It is the only mechanism that keeps tracking alive over time.
In Pulse, hours always run against a project - by timer or entered afterwards, on a desktop or a phone. Recorded hours appear immediately in the project view and feed job costing with no intermediate step.