Time tracking for agencies

An agency does not have a time tracking problem. It has a problem joining four things that usually live apart: the hours people log, the week somebody approves, the margin on the account, and the invoice that goes out. Time Trakkr is those four in one place, so the number on the invoice and the number in the profitability report come from the same rows.

The workflow, end to end

Time is logged against a client project and a task — typed, timed, or started from a Jira issue. It is billable or not according to the task, not a checkbox on each entry, so two people logging the same kind of work get the same answer.

At the end of the week the person submits the timesheet and an approver reviews it. Approval is the point the hours stop being a draft: a submitted week locks, and an approver can open the entries behind it without leaving the approvals screen.

Approved time feeds two things at once. It lands in the profitability report as revenue and cost, and it becomes available to invoice. An invoice is drafted from uninvoiced billable time for one client over a date range, then reviewed and sent by a person.

How margin is actually calculated

Two figures, computed from the same time entries, with one asymmetry that matters:

• Revenue counts billable time only, multiplied by the effective billable rate. The rate is resolved in order: the rate stored on the entry itself, then the person’s rate on that project, then the project’s hourly rate, then the person’s default at that date, then their current default.
• Cost counts all tracked time, billable or not, multiplied by the effective cost rate — the entry’s own, then the person’s on that project, then their default at that date, then their current default.

That asymmetry is deliberate, and it is the reason the number is worth looking at. Time somebody spends on an account that cannot be billed still costs the agency money, so it drags the margin down exactly as it does in reality. A tool that counted only billable hours on both sides would report every project as healthy.

Rates are resolved from a snapshot on the entry where one exists, so raising somebody’s rate does not silently restate last quarter’s margin.

Retainers are measured against the month they are in

A budget that resets monthly is measured against that month. This is worth stating plainly because it was wrong until recently: a retainer was charged every hour the project had ever had against a single month’s allowance, so a healthy 20-hour retainer three months old reported itself as badly overdrawn. It now counts only the month you are looking at, and you can step back through previous months.

What this does not do

Worth knowing before you commit time to it:

• It does not send invoices by itself, and neither does the assistant. A draft is created from approved time; a person reviews and sends it.
• It is not a project management tool. There are no boards, sprints or dependencies. It connects to Jira rather than replacing it.
• It does not monitor anybody. No screenshots, no idle detection, no activity scoring.
• It is in an invite-only beta, free while we onboard teams a few at a time. That is a real constraint on how quickly you can start, and the pricing after beta is not yet set.

Getting your history across

Existing hours come with you rather than starting from an empty timesheet — see migrating from Harvest, which covers what transfers and what does not. If you are still choosing, the agency time tracking comparison puts us next to the alternatives with dated, sourced pricing.

Where to go next

• Everything between the hour and the invoice — the full feature walkthrough.
• Ask — logging and querying time in plain English, and connecting an AI client over MCP.
• Jira — link entries to issues and push hours back as worklogs.
• Help center — how approvals, budgets and invoicing work in detail.

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