Topics:
You may have many different reasons for tracking time in your company: billing customers, boosting internal productivity, forecasting project duration, or applying for tax credits. Whatever the reason, it’s essential that time tracking data be complete, accurate and accessible.
And that’s our goal here at Tempo: to facilitate high-quality, accurate time recording. How do we do it? There’s our seamless integration with Jira, for one. There’s our real-time tracker, our multiple ways to log time, and our easy-to-use UI. But the newest and most radical development is our automatic time tracking for Cloud, which is generated directly from what you and your developers do at work.
This automation is a game-changer.
With Tempo’s automated time tracker, our customers can create a detailed and accurate picture of any workday to include meetings attended, tickets and issues worked on, and code committed from a variety of applications - all with Just. One. Click.
No more struggling to remember the tasks you worked on. No more cobbling together disjointed notes on what you’ve done. No more time spent at the end of the day correcting time records and filling in gaps.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
How time tracking automation works
Tempo's “Activity Feed” draws its information on the activities performed by users from a wide range of providers. These providers create what are called activity cards in Tempo, which are suggestions within your timesheet that can be transformed into time records.
Providers currently include Jira, Google Calendar, Office 365 Calendar and Visual Studio Code (VS Code), but they will eventually expand to include IntelliJ, Bitbucket, Github, Asana, and beyond!
How does automated time tracking work for Jira, for example? Every time you go into a Jira issue, that event will appear in your timesheet with the associated time stamps. You could go in and put a comment on an epic or subtask, or change a status, or transition the epic from one flow to another. That event will subsequently appear directly in your timesheet as an activity card.
From there, you can adjust the time, the issue key, and the description on the activity card to easily log work.
There’s more. With intelligent suggestions in Tempo, recently logged items are tracked to highlight the most relevant issue keys for each time record. Our handy calendar integrations also enable you to efficiently log work on calendar entries that are automatically synced with Tempo Timesheets. Enter an issue key in the meeting invite, and it will automatically sync with Tempo.
What automatic time tracking is not
With these advanced time tracking features, you may be concerned that automation is intruding into other activities. This is absolutely not the case. Tempo does not monitor browser history, take screenshots of user activity, or use biometric recognition. Access controls let you determine the visibility of your employee timesheets and set privacy settings.
We’re here to help you, not spy on you!
Related article: Time tracking is not about spying on your employees
Conclusion
It’s not uncommon for users to be reluctant to track their time, particularly developers. Every day they spend time working on a variety of different platforms, and then have to track time manually. This means remembering all of the many tasks they have worked on, and filling out worklogs for each of them.
It’s time-consuming and not particularly fun!
The key to motivating developers to track time is to lift as many barriers as possible and build a hassle-free time tracking experience. With automatic time tracking, the process is streamlined and as easy as just one click.
There’s less need to:
- start and stop timers
- switch between programs
- correct errors
Accuracy goes up with automation, so management knows they can trust the data.
And isn’t easy, quick and accurate time tracking data what we’re all looking for?
