2.2. How to track time for your work

You may want to track time for two reasons: to bill your customers if you charge by the hour and to know where the time goes (even if you don't bill it). This tutorial continues the previous lesson and shows how to record time to a task using time entries.

  1. Make sure the Rhetoric project is open and click the New button to create a task.

    1. Enter Administrative work in the Name field.

    2. Make sure the Billable box is not checked.

    3. Click Create.

    You'll create a non-billable task to track the time spent on administrative work, things that you do for the project but are not billed to the client. Now you have two tasks that can be used to track time (Proofreading the manuscript and Administrative work).

  2. Right-click Administrative work in the tasks table and select New Time from the contextual menu to add time to it.

    1. Enter a past date in the Date field.

    2. Type 10:00 in the Start field.

    3. Enter 1:30 in the Time field.

    4. Type Initial meeting in the Description field.

    5. Click Create.

    The Time column for this task will be updated and will display 1:30.

  3. Repeat step #2 and add a new time entry of 45 minutes with the description Final meeting. Now the Time column should display 2:15.

  4. Repeat step #2, this time for the Proofreading the manuscript task and add two time entries. One entry for 6 hours that has the description First 100 pages and one entry for 2:52 hours with the description The last 40 pages. The Time column for this task should now display 8:52.

    Once you're done, you can notice that the total time below the table is 11:07 which represents the time recorded for all tasks.

  5. Go to View » Timesheet to switch the view from Projects to Timesheet.

    The Timesheet view is the place where you can see all time entries. You can return to this view whenever you need to get the big picture or to review your time.

Time entries are explained in more detail in a separate section. You'll learn how to move time entries from one task to another and how to create time reports.