Time tracking and timesheets

The problem

Hours logged in a separate tool, or a spreadsheet, drift away from the work they describe. At month end someone reconstructs the week from memory, the client questions a line, and the figure that was reported last month has quietly changed since.

How SAQ solves it

Time is always on a ticket, so every hour has a context: the client, the project, the kind of work. The month closes for good, so a report for a closed period reads the same forever, and corrections are new, visible entries rather than edits to history.

What you get

Time entries

Date, optional start time, minutes, note, billable flag. Logged from the ticket, the weekly grid, or the API. Notes are never shown to clients.

Weekly grid

A timesheet view per person: tickets as rows, days as columns, cells you type into, arrow keys to move. An optional weekly target shows who is under their expected hours.

Periods and period close

Monthly or weekly periods in the workspace timezone. Close is contiguous and irreversible, with a checklist before you do it: users under target, entries on moved tickets, missing rates, work in progress.

Corrections

Wrong or forgotten time in a closed period is fixed by a correction entry in the open period, which may be negative. The original is never touched. Reports for the closed period stay stable; the current view shows the net.

Reports

By person, project, ticket, billing client, period, consultant category, billable or not, outcome (charged, time bank, free), and billed or unbilled, as of now or as of close. Work in progress on tickets billed at completion is listed separately.

Non-ticket time

Meetings, admin, and absence are tickets in an internal project, so the week reconciles.

Timezones

Each person has a timezone. The date you chose is the date that counts, with no conversion into the workspace timezone.

Key benefits

• Hours logged while working, with the ticket as context
• A week you can check at a glance before it closes
• Closed figures that never change under you
• Corrections that are visible and auditable, not silent edits
• Reports that answer the questions a manager and a client actually ask

Typical use cases

• Month end at a consultancy. Everyone fills in gaps in the weekly grid, the admin runs the checklist and closes September, and the billing run for each client can start.
• A forgotten day. Discovered in October, a September entry is added as a correction dated in October with the real date in the note. September's report is unchanged; the client's October timesheet shows the adjustment.
• Estimate follow-up. A project manager compares spent against estimate per epic and spots a deliverable that is drifting.

Why this is simpler

SAQ does not try to be a timer, a calendar, or an HR system. It records dated work on tickets and makes closed months immutable. That is the part that makes billing trustworthy, and it is the part most time trackers get wrong by letting anyone edit anything.