It is 4.40pm on Friday at a twelve-person agency. The timesheet reminder lands, and six people start reconstructing a week they only half remember: the Bluebird call that ran long on Tuesday, the amends for Acme that were "about an hour, maybe two", the Thursday afternoon that went to a pitch nobody set up a project for. The sheet gets filled, it is roughly right, and the account manager finds out on the 28th that the retainer ran over. An AI timesheet assistant does not fix that by being clever on Friday. It fixes it by making Tuesday’s entry take eight words on Tuesday.
Why the Friday timesheet is always a little wrong
The hours themselves are not the problem. People know, roughly, what they did. The problem is the gap between doing the work and writing it down: open the tool, find the project, find the milestone, pick the day, type the number, type the note. Five small steps, repeated for every piece of work, is enough friction that the writing-down moves to the end of the week, and at the end of the week it is a memory test. The retainer gauge the account manager relies on is only as good as what was entered, so a sheet reconstructed on Friday means burn is discovered after the fact. We have written about that pattern in see retainer burn before the invoice; this post is about the entry step itself.
One distinction before going further, because the word "timesheet" covers two different records. The attendance record says when a person was working: clocked in, on a break, on leave. The project record says what the hours were for: three hours on the Bluebird retainer, for the brand review. An agency needs both and they are not the same thing. The assistant described here fills the second kind. The first keeps its own rules, for reasons that come later. The longer version is in attendance vs time tracking vs timesheets.
What an AI timesheet assistant actually is
Not a chatbot bolted onto the timesheet page. The useful version is the assistant your team already has open all day, whether that is Claude, ChatGPT or Claude Code, connected to the systems the hours live in. In Orbiz that connection is Orbiz MCP: a member approves access on a consent page, tool by tool, and from then on the assistant acts as that person, with that person’s permissions. If your role in Trackline lets you log time, the assistant can log time. If it does not, the assistant gets the same refusal you would. There is no separate bot account with its own, broader access, and nothing it does is hidden: every action is recorded against your name, and an admin can see the organisation-wide list.
This works because the assistants themselves are built for it. Anthropic’s help centre says custom connectors are available on Claude, Cowork and Claude Desktop across its plans, that on Team and Enterprise plans an Owner adds the connector once and each member then connects under Customize → Connectors, and that once connected "Claude can access those services and take action in them". OpenAI’s developer mode guide for ChatGPT says write actions require confirmation by default, so a request to log hours is shown to you before it is sent. The steps for connecting either one to Orbiz are in Settings → Connected AI apps, and each person does it for themselves.
Filling the sheet by saying what you did
A time entry in Trackline needs four things: the project, the hours, the day, and what the time was for. Say them and the entry is made. Some requests that work as written, with your own client names swapped in:
- "Log 3 hours on the Acme retainer today for the brand review." Project, hours, day and a note: nothing left to guess. This is the entry most people put off, and it is now a sentence.
- "Log 2 hours on the Bluebird retainer for today’s client call." The same shape, said while the call is still fresh. Thirty seconds after hanging up is when the number is accurate.
- "Log 1.5 hours on the Northwind retainer for Tuesday, against the Q4 campaign milestone, for the copy deck." A milestone narrows the entry to the piece of work. It is optional; name it the way the project names it.
- "Log 6 hours on the Hartley audit engagement for Wednesday, for the fieldwork." The same request works for a consultancy’s engagements as for an agency’s retainers; the work date is what every total and the monthly statement key on.
What lands in Trackline is an ordinary manual time entry under your name, the same as one typed into the Log hours dialog: it appears on the project’s time log, it counts in the month, and on a retainer it shows up in the monthly statement against the allowance. If someone with the financials permission opens that statement, the entry is costed at your rate from your HR record at the moment they look, the way every Trackline hour is. Nothing about the entry is marked as "from an assistant" in a way that changes how it is treated, and nothing about it is approved on the way in: logging project hours in Trackline does not go through an approval step, whoever typed them.
What it can read back
The read side is where the Friday dread goes away for good, because the sheet is no longer something you discover at the end of the week. You can ask at any point:
- "How many hours did I log this month, by project?" A list, with the retainers and the fixed-price work side by side. Ask for last month too and you have a comparison.
- "How many hours have gone on the Bluebird retainer this month?" The burn in hours. Put it next to the allowance the retainer was sold on and you know where the month stands on the 12th, not the 28th. The statement itself, allocated against logged, month by month, with the overrun in red, is a Trackline screen; the assistant gives you the running total.
- "Show my timesheet for last week." This one comes from AMS rather than Trackline: the attendance record, with clock-ins, breaks and the project each stretch was filed under. Reading it is an assistant action; changing it is not, and the next section says why. The full list of what an assistant can and cannot do in AMS is on the AMS assistant page.
What the assistant reads back is hours. Rates, cost and margin stay in Trackline’s own reports, which have no assistant action, so a member asking about their own time is never handed the agency’s pricing by accident.
What it cannot do, on purpose
An assistant that could do everything in a timesheet system would be a liability, not a convenience. The limits below are not gaps waiting to be filled; each is a decision, and each is stated on the product pages so nobody connects an assistant expecting more.
| If you ask it to… | What happens |
|---|---|
| Approve a timesheet | Nothing. There is no assistant action that decides a timesheet change request. Approving stays with the approver, in AMS. |
| Change someone’s rate | Nothing. Rates live on the employee record in HRMS, and employee records have no assistant action. |
| Delete a wrong entry | Nothing. Time entries, milestones and projects cannot be deleted through an assistant. Fix it in Trackline by hand. |
| Show the retainer’s margin or the profitability report | Nothing. Insights and profitability reports are not reachable; hours are. |
| Clock me in | Nothing. The attendance timer has no assistant action, in either direction. |
| Fix my check-in time from Tuesday | Nothing. Attendance corrections are not reachable. Raise the change in AMS, with a reason, and an approver decides. |
The practical consequence is that the worst an assistant can do with hours is log the wrong number against the right project, and that is visible on the time log and correctable in the dialog the same afternoon. It cannot make the mistake disappear, and it cannot touch the numbers that turn hours into money.
Why the manager still approves in AMS
The attendance timesheet in AMS is a record of when a person was working, and it feeds leave, reports and payroll. So a member cannot simply rewrite it. When someone edits one of their own entries, moves a stretch of time to a different project or asks for a missed check-out to be set, AMS turns that into a change request with a written reason, and the request sits in the Timesheet Approvals queue until an approver accepts or rejects it, with a note. Once a day’s time is moved to the project it was really worked on, reports and Trackline follow.
That approval is deliberately a human step, and no assistant action exists for it: not to raise the request on your behalf, and not to decide it on the approver’s. An assistant that could approve its own corrections would make the attendance record worth less than the sheet it replaced. So the split an agency ends up with is clean. Project hours, the thing an account manager needs to see on the 12th, can be dictated to an assistant and land in Trackline immediately. The attendance record keeps its gate, and the person who approves it is the same person who approved it before.
For a team that clocks in against a client project, the two records meet without anyone entering hours twice: AMS time filed under a project flows into Trackline alongside the entries the assistant made, and the Time page shows every hour across the portfolio, whichever way it arrived.
Setting it up at an agency
- Create each retainer client as a Trackline project with its monthly hours and fee, so the statement has an allowance to compare against. The agency set-up walks through this.
- Assign the people who work on each client to its project. Trackline keys the time log to a project’s assignees, so an unassigned person has nowhere to put their hours.
- Check that the roles of the people who will dictate their hours allow logging time in Trackline. The assistant inherits exactly that.
- Each person connects their own assistant from Settings → Connected AI apps and ticks Trackline (and AMS, if they want to read their timesheet). Nobody connects on another person’s behalf.
- Try one entry each, open Trackline, and check it landed where it should. Then agree the habit: log the hours before leaving the call, not on Friday.
- Give account managers the retainer statement and a threshold, say 70% of hours at 50% of the month, and ask them to check it mid-month rather than at the invoice.
Where this is not the answer
If your team already clocks in against a client project in AMS, you do not need an assistant for hours at all: choosing the project at clock-in is the entry, and inactivity detection keeps it honest. Dictation suits the people whose day is not a single timer, such as account managers and leads moving between clients, and the work done away from a desk. If you need the hours to become an invoice, Trackline does not invoice; it gives you the costed statement to invoice from. And if the plan is to have assistants fill in sheets for people, from a calendar or from guesswork, stop: an assistant acts as one member, with that member’s permissions, and the record is only worth keeping if the person who did the work said what it was.
The requests above, and the rest of what an assistant can do across Orbiz, are collected in the prompt library, each marked as reading or changing something.
Sources
Anthropic, "Get started with custom connectors using remote MCP", Claude Help Center, read 9 October 2026. OpenAI, "ChatGPT developer mode", read 4 October 2026; by 9 October the guide had moved from the address we read it at, and the saved text is what is quoted. Product behaviour is described from Orbiz as it is today, not from a roadmap.
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