Time tracking

Time tracking with billable hours and estimate accuracy

Start and stop a timer on a task or log time by hand, mark entries billable, and see actual time measured against the original estimate.

Included on Basic and up

app.planner.day/task/export-retrieslive

Export retries drop the last batch

01:12:40running

Actual against estimate

6h 15m logged 5h estimate4h 30m billable

In one answer

Does Planner.day track time?

Yes. You can start and stop a timer directly on a task, or log time manually after the fact if you forgot. Each entry can be marked billable, and actual time accumulated is shown against the estimate that was set on the task, so the gap between what work was expected to take and what it took is visible without exporting anything.

Time tracking fails when it is a second application. If logging an hour means opening another tool, finding the right project and typing a description, it gets done on Friday from memory, which produces numbers nobody should make decisions with.

In Planner.day the timer is on the task.

Two ways in

Start and stop a timer while you work, on the task you are working on. No project picker, no description field to fill in first, because the task already knows what it is.

Log time manually when the timer was not running, which is most of the time for most people. The honest design assumption is that people forget, so the correction path has to be as fast as the happy path.

Billable

Each entry carries a billable flag. That distinction is the difference between a number that describes effort and a number you can invoice from, and it has to be set per entry rather than per project, because the same task frequently contains both.

Against the estimate

Tasks carry an estimate in hours. As time accumulates, actual is shown against that estimate.

This is the number with the most value and the least ceremony attached to it. Not to police anybody, but because a team that can see that a category of work consistently takes three times its estimate will change how it plans. A team that cannot see it will keep making the same commitment.

Who logged what

Entries are attributed to the person who logged them, and roll into the per-person analytics alongside throughput and cycle time. See dashboards and analytics.