Ask three managers what "time tracking" means and you get three products. One means knowing who is in today. One means knowing how long the redesign took. One means a sheet of hours per client that becomes an invoice. They are related, they share a clock, and they are not the same thing. Buying one when you needed another is how a team ends up paying for two.
Three questions, three tools
| Attendance | Time tracking | Timesheets | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question | Who is working right now, and who is off? | How long did this piece of work take? | How many hours go on this client or project this period? |
| Unit | A day or a shift | A task or an entry | A period (week, month, retainer) |
| Who reads it | Managers, HR, payroll | Whoever owns the work | Finance, account managers, clients |
| Typical failure | Leave approved with no cover | Estimates never checked against reality | Hours reconstructed on Friday from memory |
Attendance is about presence and absence. It answers whether someone is in, on a break, on leave or on holiday, and it feeds payroll and compliance. Its natural unit is the day or the shift. It needs leave policies, holiday calendars and approvals far more than it needs a stopwatch.
Time tracking is about effort. It attaches hours to a piece of work — an issue, a project, a client — so that someone can later compare the estimate with reality. Its natural unit is the entry: started this, stopped that. It cares about what the time was spent on, which attendance never asks.
Timesheets are the reporting layer over the other two. They roll effort up into a period and a bucket that finance recognises: forty hours on the Northwind retainer in September. A timesheet without time tracking underneath is a memory test; a timesheet without attendance underneath cannot tell a short day from a day off.
Who needs which
- A clinic, school or store mostly needs attendance. Shifts, leave, holiday calendars, a device at the door. Time tracking per task would be noise.
- A software or product team mostly needs time tracking against work items, and light attendance for leave. Nobody there wants to clock breaks.
- A consultancy or agency needs all three, because the hours are the product. Attendance says who is available, time tracking says what they did, and the timesheet turns it into an invoice or a retainer statement.
Why they should share one clock
The three tools diverge in what they report, not in what they record. The underlying fact is the same: a person, a start, a stop, and optionally a thing the time was for. When attendance and time tracking share that record, a clock-in that also names a project is both an attendance session and a time entry, and the timesheet is a query rather than a form.
This is how Orbiz AMS is built. A member clocks in from the browser, optionally against a project, and takes breaks; inactivity detection can pause the timer when the desk goes quiet. Leave, holiday calendars and approvals live in the same tool. The hours then flow into Trackline, which costs them at each person’s rate from their HR record and rolls them into milestones and retainer periods. Nobody fills in a second sheet, because the timesheet is the same data seen per client.
Three rules that keep the record honest
- Record at the time, report later. Hours entered on Friday for Tuesday are estimates dressed as facts. A clock that runs while the work happens is the only way to have a real number, and inactivity detection is what keeps that clock honest without asking people to babysit it.
- Keep the raw session and the approved session separate. A manager may need to correct a missed clock-out. The correction should sit beside the original, not replace it — the same rule we describe for device imports.
- Let policy live in one place. Leave entitlements, break types, holiday calendars and the auto-stop cap for a forgotten timer are decisions. Configure them once, on the server, and every client — browser today, a desktop app or phone later — applies the same rule.
What this looks like for a services firm
Take a twelve-person consultancy with five active engagements, two on retainer. On Monday the operations lead wants to know who is out this week (attendance), the engagement leads want to know whether last week’s work matched the estimate (time tracking), and finance wants the September hours per client for invoicing (timesheets). With one record, those are three views of the same entries — and the retainer burn is visible on the twelfth, not on the invoice. We go deeper on that in agency retainer burn: see it before the invoice, and the professional services and agency pages show how each kind of firm sets it up.
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