Project time tracking means recording working hours against specific projects and tasks, so you can see what each project costs, how it compares with its budget and where the time goes. Set up a short list of projects, have people tag time as they work and review hours against budget every week.
Key takeaways
- Tag time when the work happens, not afterwards.
- Keep the structure shallow: client, project, task.
- Review budget burn weekly so an overrun is a warning, not a surprise.
- Untagged time is the first number to check.
Why track time by project?
Cost and profit
Hours are the main cost of most projects. Without them you cannot know which projects make money.
Better estimates
Past projects are the only honest basis for future quotes.
Early warning
Budget burn shows an overrun weeks before the deadline does.
Billing
Hours by project become invoices.
Workload
You can see who is spread across too many things.
How do you set up project time tracking?
- List your projects. One per client engagement or internal initiative.
- Add tasks only where they help. Three to seven per project is usually enough.
- Set a budget in hours for each project or period.
- Choose members. Decide who may book time to each project.
- Tag as you work. People pick the project in the tracker when they start.
- Clear untagged time weekly.
- Report every week.
What structure should you use?
| Level | Example | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Client | Northwind Ltd | Only if you serve several clients |
| Project | Website redesign | One per budget or statement of work |
| Task | Checkout page copy | Keep to work that takes hours, not minutes |
Add buckets for time that belongs to no client project, such as internal meetings, training and administration. Otherwise that time ends up on whichever project is nearest.
Which reports matter?
| Report | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Hours against budget | Will we overrun? |
| Hours by person | Who is carrying this project? |
| Hours by task | Where is the effort going? |
| Hours by day or week | How fast are we burning? |
| Untagged time | What are we failing to attribute? |
How do you read budget burn?
Compare the share of budget used with the share of work or time elapsed.
Example: a project has a 40-hour budget. After 60% of the timeline, 31 hours are used. At that pace the project will take 31 รท 0.6 = about 52 hours, which is 29% over budget. You know this with 40% of the timeline left, which is enough time to cut scope, renegotiate or accept the cost knowingly.
How do you use tracked time to estimate better?
Every finished project is a correction to your next quote. Compare the estimate with the hours actually tracked, by type of work.
Example: you estimated 20 hours for design and tracked 26. Your design estimates run at 1.3 times reality. Apply that factor to the next design estimate, or find out what the extra 6 hours were and price it separately.
After a few projects you will have a factor for each kind of work, based on your own team's record instead of on optimism.
What goes wrong with project time tracking?
Too many tasks
People stop choosing carefully.
Tagging later
Time assigned from memory is fiction.
No home for internal time
It leaks onto client projects.
Stale budgets
The scope changed and the budget did not.
Reports nobody reads
Data without a weekly review changes nothing.
What about teams that work in Jira?
If your tasks already live in Jira, track time against the issues themselves so the hours appear where the work is planned. See the Jira time tracking guide.
How does BirdsEye handle project time tracking?
- Projects. Named and color-coded, active or archived.
- Hour budgets. A budget for a period, with consumption shown against it.
- Members. Choose who may book time to each project.
- Tasks. Each with a status and a priority.
- Tagging in the agent. People pick their project and task while they work.
- Jira issues. Choose a Jira issue as the task without leaving the agent.
- Manual entries. For meetings and calls away from the computer.
- Clean-up. Reassign a block of time, or attach a project to untagged time in bulk.
- Project report. Totals against budget, by day, hour, person, application and task.
- CSV export.
Because BirdsEye records time automatically, tagging is the only thing people have to do. Projects, tasks and budgets are part of the Team plan. See pricing and the features.
Frequently asked questions
What is project time tracking?
It is the practice of recording hours against specific projects and tasks, so that cost, progress and profitability can be measured project by project.
How detailed should tasks be?
Detailed enough to answer the questions you will ask later, and no further. If nobody will ever look at a task's total, the task should not exist.
How do you track time across multiple projects?
Switch the active project in the tracker each time you change work. With automatic tracking, the hours follow the selection, and anything left untagged can be assigned at the end of the week.
What is the difference between project time tracking and project management software?
Project management software plans the work: tasks, owners and deadlines. Project time tracking records the hours that work consumed. The two are most useful together.