Ask HN: Does your company require time tracking?

[yellow_lead]

My company recently introduced the requirement of time tracking for stories / bugs / tickets in general. One is supposed to log their time to these so that accounting can use the data for capex math.

Is this normal? Does your company do this? How do you keep track of everything?

[tootie]

We call this actuals. So, you put an estimate then you track how long it actually took. I've done it before. If it's accurate and used responsibly it's a somewhat useful metric. But getting accurate data is hard and tends to cause overhead.

This is different from tracking ticket age. A ticket may be open for 3 weeks but that doesn't mean it was being actively worked on for 3 weeks. That's easy to calculate and can actually be more useful for tracking velocity.

[gshdg]

My understanding from working at a company that did that was that it’s technically required in case they’re audited.

That is, to treat your salary as capital investment instead of operating costs (which has certain accounting benefits), they need to allocate that salary to specific investments (projects).

[yellow_lead → gshdg]

Yes, this is exactly what was explained to us. I only hope it doesn't become used for more than that. I already feel self conscious about if I'm logging too little time.

[gshdg → yellow_lead]

Where I was, that was very much all they used it for. Hope it’s the same for you.

FWIW, they only asked us to very roughly divide our time up with a minimum of 8 hours per workday (anything not allocated to a project or maintenance went to a bucket that included meetings, PTO, and more). I responded to that by tracking (partly for my own purposes) as many hours as I put in in a day, so I’d know when I was working too many hours per week. And to passive-aggressively make sure they’d know too!

[anticristi]

I keep track of how much time I spend on each customer, so that my company can send the right invoices. There are quite a few applications out there that can help you automate this task. I sometimes use HoursKeep.