Decide what a time record should contain.
Define purpose, access and exclusions before enabling automatic activity tracking. A practical worksheet for a transparent small-team rollout.
Work-record field guide
Capture a record people can explain
Define collection boundaries, contributor instructions, identity and permissions before records become reports.
Collect what the task requires, keep the contributor and project identity clear, and make uncertainty easy to report.
Documentation reviewed · 23 Sep 2026No hands-on merchant testing
Start with the unresolved decision
Begin with what must be recorded and which collection boundaries apply. Then establish contributor and project identity, role access and a route for manual or uncertain entries. The guides distinguish device activity from work and keep unsupported interpretations out of the record.
Keep the outcome and its limits together
Record what passed, failed or remained unknown. Product features depend on the selected plan and configuration, and these guides do not establish employment, payroll or legal requirements. If the current process already meets the need reliably, keeping it remains an option.
Choose your next check
Write clear time-recording instructions
Give contributors a usable rule for capture, correction and escalation.
Set time-record permissions by task
Separate viewing, editing, approving and exporting rights.
Keep project codes stable across exports
Maintain identifiers through renames, archived work and downstream mappings.
Record work that happens away from the keyboard
Add justified offline work without reconstructing activity from guesses.
Investigate an idle gap without guessing what happened
Separate device inactivity from the meaning of a work record.
Check what a private-time control actually changes
Test boundaries around pausing collection and retained metadata.
Separate people and sessions on shared devices
Prevent ambiguous identity and accidental cross-person attribution.
Sources and boundaries
Primary documentation supports the dated product facts. Proposed checks and fictional examples are our editorial method, not observed product results.
- DeskTime — export · checked September 23, 2026
- Time Doctor — export · checked September 23, 2026