How to track time with a team?

In companies that do a lot of client work, everyone needs to track time. Then, managers can track how much time the company spends on each project, which is important for billing, payroll, and tracking profitability.

This article covers a variety of Clockify’s features which are not available on the same subscription plan.

Clockify can show you:

• Time each team member spends on a project
• Logged activity of each team member
• Total time invested in a project

Here’s how you can set up Clockify so your team can track time:

Create and configure your workspace #

1. If you run a small company, one workspace is enough. But if you’re a bigger company, you can use multiple workspaces to keep things from mixing up (as each workspace has its own settings, members, time entries, and everything else). You can go to Workspaces and create a new workspace for each department or company subsidiary.
2. In workspace settings, upload your company logo and set up permissions. Depending on what’s your company’s privacy policy, you can make everything public or private. For example, you can limit project creation rights to only workspace administrators to keep things tidy or hide billable rates if that’s sensitive information.
3. Define groups (e.g. designers, managers) so you can assign whole teams to a project instead of adding each person one by one; so when someone arrives/leaves, you can just add/remove them from the group instead of going through each and every project.
4. Define tags so people can categorize time entries with the type of activity they’re doing. Then, you can run reports and filter by tag if you want to know how much time activities take.
5. Add clients. If you’re not in a client business, you can use this for something else (e.g. some activity) to make categorization easier as all time entries are categorized by client and project, where a project can have one client but a client can have multiple projects.

Invite your team #

1. Invite users by going to the Team section, entering emails for each team member, and adding them. After you invite a team member, they need to click the Accept invite button in the email they get. After that, they’ll jump to the Sign up form where they need to enter their full name. After they accept the invite in the next step, they’ll be added to the workspace they’d been invited to and can start tracking time.
2. Set who belongs to which team in the Team section. A person can be in multiple teams or in none. You can also set personal billable rates if you charge clients different rates, depending on who works on what (e.g. a senior developer might have a higher rate than a junior).

Set up projects #

1. Create a project, assign clients and add tasks (and assign people to them if needed) so people can track time against projects and tasks.
2. Add team members to private project. Everyone can access public projects, but if they’re private, users have to be manually assigned. You can add individual members one by one, or in bulk via groups.
3. Now that all is set up, your team can start tracking time per project. They can start a timer, or add time manually at the end of the day. To each time entry, they can add a project/task, billability status and describe what they’re working on in one short sentence. They can also add tags if you have a specific workflow for organizing data (e.g. use tags to describe type of activity).

Use reports #

1. To invoice your clients at the end of the month: go to Summary report, filter out by client and billability, select This Month for the time period, group time entries by project and subgroup by task (or time entry), and export the results. Or, if your client wants to check how much time you’ve worked at any point, share the report and send the link to your client so they can generate reports on-the-fly.
2. You and your team can use the Detailed report to see time entries that miss data, e.g. entries that are missing description or a project, and fill the missing data. This will make your reports much more accurate. You can filter entries (just like in Summary report), the only difference is that you can directly edit time entries in the Detailed report (while in Summary report you can just view and group them).

Read more: 29 time tracking best practices