Track time as you work
Open a ticket and watch a timer start on its own, watch it follow you when you switch tickets, and see what a reply banks as a real time entry on the ticket. Then check My Time for the day's tally, fix an entry that landed wrong, and see what a reviewer's exception queue looks like.
What you will have
- Watch a timer start on its own the moment you open a ticket, with nothing to click.
- Switch to a second ticket and see the first timer stop itself the instant the new one starts.
- Know what happens if you walk away: the portal asks about idle time instead of guessing, and never silently deletes it.
- Send a reply and see the minutes it observed turn into a real, billable time entry on the ticket.
- Open My Time for today, tell a slice you actually worked from one you only glanced at, and fix an entry that logged the wrong amount.
- Know what a manager sees in the Review queue, and where your billable time actually lands.
Why it works this way
The timer starting when you open a ticket, and stopping the instant you open a different one, is the same rule applied twice: only one timer runs per person, ever, so arriving somewhere new is what closes out wherever you were.
Idle time is asked about, never assumed. Thirty minutes of no mouse or keyboard activity in the portal tab flips the running slice to Idle rather than continuing to bill it as work - the wall clock keeps counting, nothing is deleted, and the minutes are still yours to reclaim later. If an Idle or Break stretch keeps running past a further two hours, it gets stopped outright and you're notified with the minutes it logged, so you can correct them before they go anywhere near an invoice.
Leftover, unattributed time doesn't get silently swept into whatever ticket happened to be open. The next time you're in the portal, anything still unassigned comes back to you as suggestions ranked by how sure the system is - a reply you sent is treated as certain, a ticket you had open and then acted on is treated as likely, a ticket you only glanced at is treated as least sure of all. You approve or correct each one; nothing books itself.
Time is action-backed, not inferred. Simply having a ticket open counts as observed activity, visible on My Time, but it never rolls into your worked total or a bill on its own - only a reply, a manual entry, or an approved suggestion does that. That's also why a ticket you only viewed shows up tagged differently from one you actually worked.
Steps
Open a ticket you haven't touched yet.
Opening #19, VPN client crashes on wake from sleep, started a timer for it with nothing else clicked. It took a few seconds to appear in the corner AI assistant widget - long enough that clicking through several tickets in a row doesn't spin up a timer for every single one - showing #19 0m with a Stop button beside it, then counting up from there the longer the ticket stays open.
Open a ticket you haven't touched yet. Open a second ticket without stopping the first timer.
Opening #20, New hire needs a laptop set up before Monday, stopped the timer on #19 by itself - banking whatever it had seen there as a Viewed slice - and started a fresh one on #20 at 0m, all with no Stop click in between. Only one timer ever runs at a time, so arriving somewhere new is what ends the last one.
Open a second ticket without stopping the first timer. Know what happens if you step away instead of switching tickets.
This instance's Idle Threshold is 30 minutes (Settings > Service Levels > Time Tracking): after 30 minutes with no mouse or keyboard activity in the portal tab, the running slice is relabeled Idle rather than kept as ticket work. The clock never stops counting and nothing is thrown away - that time is still sitting there to be reassigned later. If an Idle or Break stretch then keeps running past this instance's IDLE Hard-Stop of 120 minutes, it's stopped outright and you get a notification naming the minutes it logged, so you can correct them before anything is billed. There's no screenshot here - reaching either threshold takes real, unattended idle time, which this walkthrough didn't wait out.
Write a reply and look at the time chip before sending it.
The reply composer on #20 was already set to Auto, and the small clock control next to the message box shows the minutes observed since the ticket was opened - a fresh 0m here, since the reply was written right away. That number is a suggestion, not a lock: switching to Manual lets you type a different figure before sending, and the portal still banks the time it actually saw once you send. The Auto/Manual switch only shows up once there's a slice to choose from; with nothing observed yet, the control opens straight on Manual so you can still log the work, and it remembers your slice picks if you flip to Manual and back. Hovering the clock control compares the minutes you typed against what the tracker actually saw - an amber dot appears when the two are far apart, but that's a nudge, not a block, and you can still send.
Write a reply and look at the time chip before sending it. Send the reply and check the Time Entries card on the ticket.
Sending the reply banked a real time entry immediately - no separate save step. The Time Entries card on the ticket is also where billable time actually lands: it split into Billable and Non-billable the moment there was anything to show, reading 0:15 hrs billable, with a new 7m entry listed under today's date sitting right above the 8m entry from an earlier day. A ticket that's out of scope for a client's plan bills by the hour straight from this same card; a ticket that's covered by the plan still shows the same card, just without anything to invoice against it. On a ticket like #20, out of scope, the split is by money - Billable and Non-billable. On a ticket the plan already covers, the same card splits by where the time came from instead - Declared, meaning something you typed, timed, or attached to a reply, and Observed, meaning minutes the tracker caught on its own with nothing declared. Either way the big total at the top is only the leading part, never the two added together, and a second part only shows up once there's something in it. A green or red $ next to an entry - shown only on an out-of-scope ticket, and only if you're allowed to edit time - flips that single entry, or a whole rolled-up day, between Billable and Non-billable by hand.
Note: A ticket's Time Entries card only shows entries for that ticket. To see everything billable across every ticket for a client, that lives on the client record, not here.Send the reply and check the Time Entries card on the ticket. Fix an entry that logged the wrong amount.
Hovering the entry row on the Time Entries card revealed a pencil icon; clicking it opened an inline editor for the date, the start and end time, and the minutes themselves, with a checkmark to save. Changing 7 minutes to 12 and saving updated the card immediately, to 0:20 hrs billable with the time range recalculated to match. The same pencil is how you'd correct a timer that ran long, or one that started a little late. The date, start, and end fields are tied together - change the window and the minutes update to match, or change the minutes and the end time moves instead - and one entry can't cross midnight or run past 16 hours, so a longer stretch of real work needs splitting into two entries.
Fix an entry that logged the wrong amount. Open My Time and find today's entries.
My Time (under Time in the sidebar) lists the whole day as a Time Breakdown: a row per ticket, per internal bucket, and for Idle, each with a slice count and a total. Ticket #20, which got a real reply, has no special tag. Ticket #19 carries a Viewed tag instead - every slice under it was time spent looking at the ticket without ever declaring work on it, so it's rendered muted and doesn't count as worked time. That tag is the plain, honest signal for a low-confidence entry: it was observed, not declared. A third tag, Consumed, marks a slice already gathered under a time entry you declared elsewhere - it still shows here for visibility, but its minutes are only counted once, at that entry, not a second time on top. Clicking a ticket row expands its individual slices, and clicking one of those opens a small panel offering to move its minutes to a different bucket - Ticket, Admin, Internal, Meeting, Break, or Idle, the full built-in set the portal ships today, with no in-app screen yet for adding a named bucket of your own like Training or On-Call - or to a different ticket entirely by searching for it, the fix for time that landed in the wrong place. Reassigning a slice records its original bucket or ticket the first time, so the audit trail is preserved; a slice inside a locked (invoiced or period-closed) window refuses instead (src/app/api/time/slices/[id]/reassign/route.ts at 4b5e59a2f).
Open My Time and find today's entries. Open Review and see what a manager checks.
Review (also under Time) is exception-only - its own subhead says a clean day generates zero work, and nobody submits a timesheet for it to check against. When it has something to show, each row names a kind: a held entry waiting on confirmation, a timer left unattributed for a day, two entries overlapping on the same clock, a day with zero time logged, a day over the hours limit, time logged during a booked meeting, or time whose value moved after it was billed. A hold gets raised one of two ways: a timer safeguard, like a runaway timer stopped at its cap or one cut off at midnight, or AI time verification flagging an entry whose length doesn't match the work it saw and noting the duration it thinks is right. Held minutes still show on the ticket, but no invoicing path counts them until a person confirms them. A Looks fine action on each row clears it, and making an entry billable on the ticket itself clears it the same way - making it non-billable does not, so the question stays open until someone actually answers it. On the ticket's own Time Entries card, a held entry carries an amber Held for review chip with the AI-suggested duration in its tooltip, and clicking that chip lands right back here. The chip is internal to your team - a client looking at their own portal never sees a hold or the reasoning behind it.
Note: This queue can occasionally fail to load with a banner reading Could not load the review queue - use the refresh icon at the top of the page to retry rather than assuming the day is actually clean.
Other ways to do this
Manual time on the ticket itself
In the reply composer, switch from Auto to Manual and type the minutes yourself, with a date picker if the work happened on a different day than today. How far back that date can go is set by this instance's Re-attribution Window (Settings > Service Levels > Time Tracking), and a day that already falls inside a closed accounting period is refused until it's reopened.
The timer widget's own controls
The only manual control on a running timer is its Stop button, in the AI assistant widget's strip. There's no separate manual Start button, because opening a ticket is the start action.
Elise
Ask her directly, for example log 20 minutes on this ticket for the call with the client, and she creates the same kind of completed entry you'd get from typing it into the ticket yourself, including logging it against a teammate by name if the work was theirs.
A PSA migration
Time already logged in a PSA you're migrating away from can carry across during the switch and show up on the ticket like any other entry. Whether time is one of the things a given migration brings over is worth confirming for your own move rather than assuming.
If it did not work
- If the timer never starts when you open a ticket, check that you can actually edit this ticket first - a view-only role, or a locked or closed ticket, refuses the auto-start, and the widget shows that refusal in place of a running clock instead of staying silent.
- If your banked minutes look off by an hour or more, check your own Timezone on My Settings > Display - it decides which calendar day your slices land under on My Time, while ticket timestamps elsewhere in the portal always show the instance's own Default Timezone instead.
- If Review shows a Could not load the review queue banner, use the refresh icon in the page header before concluding the day is clean.
- If an entry or an edit is refused because its date falls inside a closed accounting period, a manager can reopen it from Time's actions menu - Close period stamps a date so nothing on or before it can be created or edited, and Reopen period rolls that boundary back; the fix is closing it again once that day's numbers are right, not before.
Questions this page answers
Does my timer start automatically when I open a ticket?
Yes, opening a ticket page auto-starts a timer for that ticket (with a 500ms debounce). Only one active timer per user is allowed; opening a different ticket stops that timer and starts a new one. Stop it early, or move logged time to a different ticket or bucket, from My Time (Time > My Time). You can turn auto-start off for the whole workspace with the Auto-Start Timer toggle under Settings, Service Levels, Time Tracking. The source is recorded as AUTO_START so reports can split auto-captured vs manual time.
How do I use the timer widget?
A timer starts automatically when you begin working a ticket and keeps running in the background as you move around the portal. The running timer and its Stop control live in the AI assistant widget, and stopping it logs the entry. On the ticket itself you can also log time by hand: type the minutes into the ticket's time bar, pick a date if the work belongs to another day, and click Log. If the entry is refused - the date sits in a closed accounting period or outside the re-attribution window - the reason shows inline in red so you can correct and retry.
How do I log time on a ticket?
There are two doors. A timer starts on its own when you open a ticket. You can stop it from the chat widget in the corner. The other door is the time control in the reply box. Auto uses the slices the timer caught. Manual lets you type the minutes, with a date and a window if you want one. Time is logged per tech and feeds both reports and billing. The Time Entries card only edits or deletes time that is already there.
What is the Auto and Manual switch on the reply time control?
Auto uses the time slices the tracker caught while you worked. You pick which slices go with the reply. Manual lets you type the minutes yourself. It gives you a Date, and a Start and End if you want them. The switch shows only when slices exist. With no slices the box opens on Manual so you can still log the work. Your slice picks are kept if you flip to Manual and back.
Why is there an amber dot on the reply time chip?
The reply box shows one time chip. It holds the minutes this reply will log. Hover it to see the minutes you typed and the minutes the tracker saw. The amber dot shows up when those two are far apart. It is a nudge, not a block. You can still send. Click the chip to see the slices or change the minutes.
What are the two parts on the Time Entries card?
On out of scope tickets the card splits the time by money. You get a Billable part and a Non-billable part. On every other ticket it splits by where the time came from. You get a Declared part and an Observed part. Declared is time somebody put there: typed, timed, or attached to a reply. Observed is time the tracker caught on its own while a tab was open. Each part folds up and has its own subtotal. The big number at the top is the lead part only, never the two added together. A second part shows only when there is something in it.
What does the $ icon on a time entry do?
It moves that entry between the Billable and Non-billable parts. On a rolled up row it moves that tech's whole day. A green $ makes an entry billable. A red $ makes it non-billable. The colour shows the way the entry will move. It shows on out of scope tickets only, and only if you can edit time.
What are the Date, Start and End fields on manual time?
Date is the work day the entry belongs to. Start and End are the real window you worked. They use the portal's own time zone. The minutes field is tied to them. Change the window and the minutes update. Change the minutes and the End moves. You can also log minutes with no window at all. One entry cannot cross midnight. One entry cannot go past 16 hours. Split longer work into two entries.
Can I log time for a different day?
Yes. Flip the reply time control to Manual and set the Date. The entry lands on the day you pick. The reply itself keeps its real time stamp. So the note stays honest and the hours land right. How far back you can go is set by the Re-attribution Window. You will find it at Settings > Service Levels > Time Tracking. A day inside a closed period is refused until that period is open again.
How do I see and reassign my time for today?
Go to Time > My Time. You'll see a continuous timeline of every minute slice, keyed to tickets, custom buckets (TICKET, ADMIN, INTERNAL, MEETING, BREAK, IDLE), or admin time. Click any slice to reassign - the original assignment is preserved for audit. Locked-period or invoiced slices can't be reassigned.
What do the Viewed and Consumed badges mean on My Time?
They mark slices that are not counted as your declared work. A ticket bucket tagged Viewed is one you only looked at: every slice on it is passive capture and you declared no minutes, so it stays muted and never rolls into your worked time. A slice tagged Consumed was gathered under a time entry you already declared, so its minutes are counted there rather than a second time. Both are shown so you can see where the tracker observed activity, not because they bill.
What are time buckets and can I add my own?
Every time slice is keyed to a bucket type. The built-in bucket types are TICKET, ADMIN, INTERNAL, MEETING, BREAK, IDLE, and CUSTOM. That built-in set is all that's available today, there is no in-app screen yet for adding your own named buckets (like Training or On-Call). Idle, break, and finalize-day behavior is configured under Settings → Service Levels → Time Tracking.
How do I close or reopen a time accounting period?
From the actions menu on this page: Close period stamps a date, and from then on no time entry dated on or before that date can be created or edited - techs get an inline refusal saying the period is closed. Reopen period rolls the boundary back if you closed too far. The stamp is tenant-wide and includes the chosen day; close after invoicing a month so the billed numbers can't drift underneath you.
What shows up in this Review queue?
Exceptions only. A clean day makes no rows, and nobody submits a timesheet. The Type column tells you which kind each row is. Needs confirmation is a held entry. Ghost pending is a timer a tech has left alone for a day. Overlap is two entries on the same clock. Zero-time day is a tech who worked in the portal and banked no minutes. Huge day is one day over your hours limit. Calendar collision is time logged during a booked meeting. Money drift is time whose value moved after it was billed. Each row says what happened.
What is a hold ("held for review") on a time entry?
A time entry the system wants a human to confirm before it can be billed. Two mechanisms raise one: the timer safeguards (a runaway timer stopped at its cap, or a timer cut at midnight), and AI time verification, which flags an entry whose duration does not match the work recorded and notes the duration it thinks is right. Held minutes still show on the ticket, but every invoicing path excludes them until someone confirms - a hold is never silently billed.
How do I clear a hold?
Two ways. Press Looks fine on the row here. Or make the entry billable on the ticket itself. The $ toggle on the ticket time card clears the hold in the same press, because a human choice beats the machine's doubt. Making an entry non-billable does NOT clear the hold. The question stays open until someone answers it.
What is the "Held for review" chip on a ticket's time card?
The visible WHY for held minutes: a held entry on a ticket's time card carries an amber "Held for review" chip, and its tooltip shows the AI-suggested duration when AI time verification raised the hold. Clicking the chip lands here on the Review queue, where the hold is acted on. The chip is internal to your team - the client portal never shows holds or AI-suspicion details.
Can I change my timezone?
Yes - the Timezone picker here offers every IANA zone. Your personal timezone changes how date-grouped views bucket days for you - dashboards, reports, your time-for-today math, and when your notification digest lands. Ticket timestamps stay on the instance Default Timezone so the whole team reads the same clock. Leave it unset to follow the company default.
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