What is employee time tracking?
Employee time tracking is the process of recording how working hours are distributed across projects, clients and tasks. Accurate time tracking is the foundation for three critical business processes:
- Client invoicing — you can only bill what you can prove was worked
- Project profitability — understanding which clients and projects are actually profitable
- Payroll accuracy — correct calculation of regular hours, overtime and allowances
For service companies and agencies, time tracking is not optional — it is the difference between a profitable and an unprofitable project.
The cost of not tracking time properly
💸 Unbilled hours
Work completed but not logged — no record, no invoice. Studies show 15% of billable hours go uninvoiced in companies without proper tracking.
📊 Unknown profitability
Without time data per project, you cannot tell whether a client is profitable or whether the team is over-servicing without billing for it.
⏰ Timesheet chaos
End-of-month Excel reconstruction from memory. Employees forget, numbers are rounded, managers spend hours chasing corrections.
📋 No approval trail
Paper or emailed timesheets with no approval workflow — disputes about what was worked and when have no audit trail to resolve them.
Why Excel timesheets don't scale
Excel works for 1–2 employees. Beyond that, these are the problems every growing team encounters:
- No real-time data — you only know how hours were spent at the end of the month, not during the week
- Version conflicts — multiple people in one file leads to overwrites and lost data
- No project linkage — hours in Excel are not connected to tickets or project tasks
- Manual aggregation — preparing a client invoice requires hours of manual copy-paste from multiple sheets
- No approval workflow — submitted timesheets have no formal review and sign-off process
A 10-person service team spending 2.5 hours each per week on timesheet admin loses 1,300 hours per year to administrative overhead — without gaining any accuracy over a digital system.
How UnitLook handles time tracking
UnitLook's time tracking module is built for service companies, IT teams and agencies where hours need to be linked to clients, projects and tickets — not just counted.
Weekly scheduler interface
Visual week view — drag and drop to log hours against a project, ticket or client. Fast, intuitive, no typing required.
Linked to tickets and projects
Hours logged are directly connected to the ticket or project task — billable hours are calculated automatically, no manual mapping.
Manager approval workflow
Employees submit weekly timesheets. Managers review, approve or request corrections. Full audit trail of every change.
Real-time analytics
Live dashboard showing hours by client, project and employee. See at a glance who is over capacity and which projects are running over budget.
One-click export
Generate a client invoice report or employee timesheet export in Excel or PDF. Filter by date range, client or project.
Mobile-friendly entry
Log hours from your phone at the end of the day. The mobile interface is as fast as the desktop — no excuses for missed timesheets.
Paper / Excel vs. UnitLook time tracking
Who is it for?
- IT agencies and software companies — billing clients accurately and tracking project profitability
- Consulting firms — tracking billable vs non-billable hours per engagement
- Service companies — linking labour costs to client contracts
- Internal IT teams — understanding how team capacity is distributed across projects
- Teams of 3 to 100+ — where "I'll remember what I worked on" no longer works
Frequently asked questions
What is employee time tracking software?
Software that records how working hours are spent — by project, client or task. It replaces paper timesheets and Excel, providing accurate data for payroll, invoicing and productivity analysis.
How do employees log hours in UnitLook?
Through the weekly scheduler — drag and drop to allocate time to a project or ticket. Works on desktop and mobile. Supports bulk entry for the full week at once, so even busy employees can catch up in minutes.
Can managers approve submitted timesheets?
Yes. UnitLook includes a full approval workflow — employees submit weekly hours, managers review and approve or request corrections. Every change is logged with a timestamp.
Does time tracking integrate with project management?
Yes. Hours are directly linked to projects and tickets, giving real-time visibility of billable hours, project profitability and employee utilisation — no manual data transfer between tools.
Track time accurately, bill confidently
Scheduler, approval workflow, analytics and one-click export. Demo 45 minutes.