How to choose time tracking software for an agency

Every time tracking tool produces a decent timesheet report. That's not the hard part, and it's not where agencies get burned.

The hard part is getting accurate entries out of people who did not become designers or developers in order to fill in timesheets. Choose for that, and the reporting question mostly resolves itself.

The number that should drive the decision

Take a hypothetical 12-person agency. Suppose each person loses just half an hour a week of genuinely billable work to vague recall — the Friday timesheet where four days blur together and everything gets rounded down.

Over 46 working weeks that's 276 hours a year. At a $130 charge-out rate, $35,880 of work delivered and not invoiced.

That figure is illustrative, not a measurement of your agency. But run your own version of it, because the answer is nearly always larger than the entire annual cost of any tool in this category. Which tells you what to optimise: not price, not report design. Capture.

Capture accuracy is the whole product

Everything else is downstream. Evaluate against these.

Time to log an entry. Count the clicks from "I finished the thing" to "logged against the right project." If it's more than a handful, entries will be reconstructed later, and reconstructed time is systematically under-reported.

Where the entry happens. People log time where they already are. A tool that lives only in a browser tab nobody keeps open loses to one that reaches into the desktop, the phone, and — if your team lives there — the chat tool.

Timer versus retrospective entry. Both need to work. Timers are accurate and get forgotten; block entry is convenient and drifts. A tool that only does one will fail half your team.

Does it survive a messy day? Realistic test: three projects, two interruptions, one call that ran long. Can someone reconstruct that day in ninety seconds without lying? If not, they'll round.

Non-billable capture. If the tool makes internal work, pitching and admin awkward to log, people won't, and your utilisation figures will look great while being wrong. You need the denominator as much as the numerator.

Approval friction. Someone has to review entries weekly. If that takes an hour, it stops happening by month three.

Dedicated trackers such as Harvest and Toggl exist because this specific problem — low-friction capture across devices — is worth building a whole product around. Time tracking bundled into a broader platform gets you fewer systems and one dataset. Both are reasonable; the trade is depth of capture against unity of data. Feature sets and pricing in this category change often, so confirm current specifics on the vendor's own site.

The three shapes on offer

Approach	Best when	Cost of the choice
Dedicated time tracker	Capture friction is your actual problem; team is remote or device-mixed	Time lives apart from projects and invoicing; you own the integration
Time inside your PM tool	Tasks already live there and you want one login	Capture is often a secondary feature and feels like it
Time inside an agency platform	You want hours, cost, rates and margin in one number	Less depth than a specialist tracker; harder to swap out later

Then check what the data can do

Once capture is solved, ask what the tool can actually answer. Insist on seeing these in a demo rather than reading about them.

Can it apply a cost rate as well as a bill rate? Without cost, you have timesheets, not profitability. Many tools do bill rate only.

Can one person hold different rates on different clients? This is normal in agencies and a surprising number of tools handle it badly.

Can you see budget burn mid-project, not just at the end? A report telling you a project went 40% over is a post-mortem. A view showing it at 60% budget consumed in week two is a decision.

Can time be locked after approval? Otherwise last quarter's numbers change under you and reconciliation becomes impossible.

Export. Full entries with timestamps, project, person, billable flag, in a file you can open. Ask to see the actual export, not the feature bullet.

Rollout matters more than selection

The tool doesn't fail. The rollout does.

Same-day entry, no exceptions. This is the single rule that determines whether your data is real. Not six-minute increments — nobody needs that — but entries made while the day is still in memory.

Tell people what it's for, truthfully. Teams assume time tracking is surveillance, and they're not being paranoid; sometimes it is. Say plainly that it exists to price work properly and to stop people being put on projects that were under-quoted. Then behave consistently with that, because the first time someone is criticised for low hours, capture quality drops permanently.

Track non-billable openly. If internal time is something to hide, it gets logged as client work, and your project costs inflate for no reason.

Fix the project list. Most bad data comes from people not knowing which project to pick. Keep the active list short, name things the way the team talks about them, and archive relentlessly.

Review weekly, not monthly. Fifteen minutes a week catches errors while people still remember. Monthly review catches nothing.

Pilot with the sceptic

Give the trial to the two people most likely to resist, not the ops-minded person who'll make any tool work. Run it for two weeks on real projects.

Then check one thing: does the total logged time for those two people look roughly like the hours they actually worked? If there's a systematic gap, capture is failing, and no amount of reporting elegance fixes it.

What to do this week

Pull last month's time entries from whatever you use now. Sort by entry timestamp and look at how many were created on a Friday afternoon covering the whole week.

That ratio is your data quality score. If it's high, you don't yet know what your projects cost — and switching tools only helps if the new one changes when people type, not just what the report looks like.