One of the most obvious differences between the two is that Clockify offers various pricing options that are more affordable per user.

In its free plan, Clockify offers unlimited projects, clients, and users, while Toggl’s free plan is limited to 5 users only.

Also, in Clockify, you can track time in multiple ways, through a timer, a timesheet, the kiosk, or the auto tracker.

This guide will show you how to export your data from Toggl Track, and import it to Clockify and make the transition seamless.

If you want to see what Clockify has to offer besides time tracking, you can skip to the part where we cover Clockify web features (3. What else can you do in Clockify?), or you can explore our features page.

How to export data from Toggl and import to Clockify?

Once you’re logged in to Toggl, go to the Reports section and select the desired date range for which you want to export the data you need.

You can filter what you want to export, for example if you want to export certain projects only, and track time only for them in Clockify.

If you wish to import only projects and clients, for example, you can open the CSV file and manually delete all the columns except for projects and clients.

Or open your file in Excel to adjust what you want to import more easily.

When your file is ready to be imported to Clockify, go to the Clockify web app, and find the Import tab in the Settings.

Select your file, and the importer will analyze what projects, clients, tags, and tasks it needs to create.

When the import is done, you will receive a notification that the import was successful and you can check your newly imported time entries and projects.

To be imported correctly, the data in your CSV file needs to be in the right format.

Formatting rules to follow

In case you try to import and your CSV file doesn’t match the format for Clockify, Clockify will notify you can quickly put data in the right format before importing the CSV file again.

To put the data in the right format, you can use any text editor on your computer, or Excel for a more comprehensive overview.

To avoid any date or time format error, make sure that time format and date format in your Profile settings match the one in the file.

You can also change the format in the file but that takes a bit more work.

Clients, Projects, Tasks, Tags, and other information you want to import should be separated by a comma, with their category in the first row, and their values in each row below.

This is the summary of all the formatting rules to follow:

Summary of formatting rules

• Only Admins can do the import.
• If an item already exists, it will be skipped during the import. Only items that don’t already exist will be created.
• Tasks can’t be imported without its Project.
• The order of the columns is not important.
• Names are case sensitive.
• You can perform an import action for an unlimited number of times, but the file size is limited to 1MB.
• User’s email in Clockify and their email in the CSV file have to match.
• Required fields for time import: Email, Start date, Start time, Duration.
• Optional fields for time import: Billable, Description, Project, Task, Client, Tag (if some of these fields are marked as required in Clockify, they will be required in CSV too).
• If you don’t group projects by client, you should rename the client column in the CSV file accordingly.
• Duration in the CSV file should match the selected Duration format in workspace settings (hh:mm:ss or h:mm).
• Values in Start time and Start date columns in the CSV file should match your start and date formats from your profile settings.
• End date and end time are calculated automatically based on start time and duration.
• Projects will inherit initial private/public and billable/non-billable status based on New projects are by default workspace settings.
• If you don’t specify an entry’s billable status, it will be inherited from its project.
• Time entries are imported according to the time zone of the person who does the import.
• Hourly rates are inherited according to the hierarchy.
• Multiple tags can be imported by surrounding tags in double quotes and separating with a comma (e.g. “tag1, tag2, tag3”)

Once your imported data is ready and organized, you can proceed to explore other Clockify features and customize it to your needs.

What else can you do in Clockify?

If you have plenty of projects and team members, or just want to delegate some of the responsibilities to other team members, you can assign them the role of a manager.

Project managers can manage their projects and tasks, decide who will have access to the project, set project estimates, and create schedules.

While team managers can manage their team’s time, manage approval of their timesheets and time off.

Time off in Clockify gives you a way to manage employees’ absence with customized time off policies and holidays, so you can better allocate your resources.

The first step for profitability tracking is setting up the billable rates for revenue tracking and cost rates for labor cost tracking.

Rates in Clockify can be set the same way as in Toggl, for workspace, project, team members, project members, with an additional option to set task rates, as well.

This way you will have a more comprehensive view of how much each task contributes or takes away from your budget.

Another way to monitor your budget is to record expenses, which can be project related to project, or kept as a log of your internal expenses.

Expenses can be billed to a client, alongside your billable hours.

Billing is quite simple. If you just import your billable hours and expenses from a certain project to an invoice, you will be able to customize it and send it to a client.

Each invoice will have its status based on the payment and sent status, so you always know what has and hasn’t been billed, what is overdue, and what is partially paid.

In case you need further details on time entries or team members, you can always create custom fields for users or time logs.

Custom time entry fields will be visible in the Detailed report, so you have all the details you need at just a glance.

A great way to allocate your resources throughout the weeks is to use scheduling.

Scheduling helps you organize your projects and employees in a clear way, always having the information on each person’s daily capacity at a glance.

You can add important milestones to your schedules, shift timelines in case the project gets postponed, and repeat the schedule for the weeks ahead.

Why choose Clockify instead of Toggl?

If you would like a more affordable time tracking tool and more flexibility with your time tracking, Clockify is the right choice.

Besides choosing between methods you use to track time, you can also track time on different devices, and all your data will be synced.

If you would like to see how other time tracking or other features in Clockify work, make sure to check out Clockify YouTube channel, or explore the website for more details.

However, if your business and team are growing, this guide will help you learn more about how to get the most out of Clockify.

Clockify’s extra features: Overview

TRACKING

Targets & Reminders

Clockify lets you set different time-tracking targets for different teams or members.

Example: Your part-time employees might need to track only 4 hours a day, while full-time employees need to track 8 hours a day, and 40 hours a week.

You can send out reminders to team members who haven’t logged enough hours, or who have logged too many hours on a certain day, week, or month.

For each reminder, you choose who will be notified – only those team members, their team managers, or all admins.

Breaks

In the same way you track the time you spend on work, you can also track the time you spend on breaks.

If you’re using a tracker, you just need to switch from tracker mode to break mode and start the clock.

The same goes for when you’re tracking time through a kiosk. Just click a break button, and the timer will start ticking.

And, in the timesheet, you choose the default break project you’ve previously set for tracking breaks and enter the time you spent on a break.

Custom fields & Required fields 

If you want to keep track of additional information for time entries or in user profiles, you can create custom time fields and custom user fields.

Custom fields can be in the form of a text, number, link, switch button, or a single or multiple selection list.

Custom time entry fields will be visible in the tracker part, and custom user fields will be visible in the user profile.

You can also choose for which projects a custom time entry field will be visible, and determine its default value.

Clockify will prevent users from saving incomplete entries if some of the fields are marked as required (works both for default and custom fields).

Import time

If you’ve been using another way of noting your team’s work hours, and you want to continue where you left off, Clockify gives you the option to import your timesheets (in CSV format).

Kiosk customization & PIN

A kiosk is a way to track time in Clockify. It can be used on any device with an internet connection.

Kiosk customization lets you add your company’s logo and choose how long the kiosk is open when launched.

This is useful when different teams have different shift schedules, so you can set multiple kiosk stations across different locations and customize the length of active sessions.

Personal PIN codes let your team members log in to track their time on a kiosk with their PIN code, which increases overall security and accuracy of time tracking.

QuickBooks integration

Clockify integrates with QuickBooks, so you can send recorded time from Clockify for billing and accounting in QuickBooks.

By connecting Clockify with QuickBooks, you will be able to sync users and customers, and automatically add any missing information (users, or customers/projects).

REPORTING

Estimates & Alerts

Clockify gives you a way to stay on top of project deadlines and budgets by setting up their time and budget estimates.

Time estimates can be set in total for the whole project completion, or you can set it for each task on a project if you want to track the progress in more detail.

Both options can be set to reset every month, so each time a new month starts, dedicated hours to that project or a task will renew.

If your time estimate is set for the whole project, you can choose whether that time will include non-billable hours.

This way you ensure that non-billable activities (e.g. meetings) don’t take away from the overall time you have at your disposal to complete the project.

The budget estimate works the same. It can be set for the whole project in total, or as task-based.

It can reset every month – which is great for retainer contracts.

The budget can also include billable expenses if a portion of it is allocated for occasional expenses.

Then, by tracking your billable activities and billable expenses, you will be able to see the current status and remaining budget.

Labor cost & profit

Clockify gives you a way of tracking your total generated revenues and labor costs, so you have an accurate representation of your business’s profitability – at any given time period.

To set the ground for profit analysis, you first need to set up billable rates (for revenues) and cost rates (for costs).

Your profitability can be tracked for the whole organization, per team member, team, project, task, client, or team member on a project.

Depending on how detailed you want your profit analysis to be, you can set more or less specific billable rates and cost rates.

As your team tracks time on their work, Clockify will pick up the rates information and you will be able to see revenues, costs, and profits in Reports, and export them for further analysis.

Team reports

There are two types of Team reports in Clockify: Attendance and Assignment reports.

The Attendance report shows you the daily start and end time for each member, allows you to compare the team’s work capacity with the actual hours worked, and see their daily time off.

The Assignments report shows you the difference between the scheduled and tracked hours, with a progress bar demonstrating the difference visually.

Both reports give you the option to filter out displayed information in multiple ways, and export reports in a customized view.

Example: Attendance report can show you overtime hours for certain team members only, that are larger than 1h and smaller than 3h, or overtime hours that are exactly 2h long.

Example: Assignments report can show you the progress for multiple projects of one client. Or the comparison between the progress pace of different teams allocated to similar projects.

Expense report

All your expenses will be visible on the Expense report, where you can filter them by team, client, project, category, status, note, or date. This report can also be exported.

GPS tracking

GPS tracking lets you see where your on-field employees currently are (e.g. which client site), and when was the last time they were active.

This is possible only if your team is using the Clockify app on their mobile (iOS, Android).

You can also use the GPS tracking feature to replay the team’s daily routes and check if their transportation routes or allocation on sites could be optimized.

Audit log & Time audit

With a time audit, you can find all entries that are too short/long or are missing information such as a project or a task.

The Audit log shows you all the changes made to a time entry by a certain user on a particular date.

This is useful when you have to provide a justification for afterward changes to an already recorded and approved timesheet.

For example, government agencies like DCAA require you to keep precise records with audit trails for all changes.

You can run audits for a particular date or time period, for a specific user, or for an action that was made (e.g. creation, edits, deletion).

Audit logs older than 1 year are automatically deleted, so you can regularly export your audit log reports as CSV files.

Scheduled reports

Scheduled reports give you a way to receive custom reports every day, week, or month, without repeating the process of filtering and exporting data regularly.

The report will be received via email, and you can choose who will receive it and how often.

Project templates

If your team often works on similar projects, you can organize work much easier with project templates.

When you create your typical project for the first time, save it as a template, so next time you’re adding a new project, you can choose this template as a basis.

The newly created project will inherit its task structure and settings, but you will be able to edit it further.

Forecasting

Clockify forecasting gives you a way to track and foresee your progress on a project.

It takes into consideration the estimates, schedules, and tracked time to warn you if and by how much you will exceed the deadline or remain within it.

Based on that, you can then adjust the estimates, or re-schedule your team.

Customize reports & Time rounding

Besides filtering, Clockify gives you the option to customize reports even further every time you export them.

You can choose which columns to display in reports, no matter if it’s in CSV, Excel, or PDF format.

For example, if you’re sharing the report with a client, you might want to exclude the information on employee IDs or any notes a time entry has.

You can also round time entries up, down, or to the nearest value so reports provide a quick and easy overview.

Screenshots

The screenshotting option is available only on Clockify desktop apps (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Screenshots are taken only while the timer is running and can’t be taken without the user’s knowledge (if active, all users receive a notification).

Screenshots are taken every 5 minutes and are by default blurred for privacy and security reasons, but they can also be taken in higher resolution.

Decimal format

Activating decimal format will enable you to see, enter, and export time in decimal format.

When you export your data it will be displayed as such, so you get the prepared numbers for further calculations or analysis.

MANAGEMENT

Time off

Your team’s time off is managed through Holidays and Policies. The difference is that Holidays don’t require the approval process, unlike Policies which usually do.

Both Holidays and Policies will have a dedicated color to distinguish them easily, and a list of people they apply to.

Holidays can be set to repeat annually on selected dates. And Policies can be customized even further, by choosing if they will:

• be expressed in days or hours, 
• require approval, 
• have a negative balance so users can request time off even if they don’t have accrued days, 
• automatically accrue each year, and
• be possible to request half a day off.

Time off requests can be filtered by status (pending, approved, rejected), team member, and date or time period, and then exported for your internal log.

The Timeline tab gives you an overview of who is absent, for how long, and based on which time off policy or holiday.

The Balance tab shows how many days team members have used and how many time off days they have left.

You can also manually add or remove time off days from their balance, see their history of time off changes, and export data for your internal logs.

Approval

No matter what type of business you’re in, you’re bound to need some kind of approval, whether it’s for work hours, team time off, or expenses.

Example: If the law requires that recorded work hours should be reviewed by at least two people (e.g. employee and manager), timesheet approval will make sure this is respected.

However your team tracks their time, their work hours will be visible in the Timesheet section.

From there, they can review it and submit the timesheet for manager approval.

Submitted timesheets and expenses will have a “pending approval” label, so you know they’ve already been submitted.

You can review pending requests and reject or approve them one by one, or glance over the main information and approve all timesheets with one click.

Example: Say you work 40 hours a week and someone submits a timesheet with 37 hours, and you see that the employee took 3 hours off that week, you can instantly know this timesheet can be approved.

Pending requests can show more details and be edited if you just click on them.

You can also remind Team Managers to approve their team’s timesheets and remind all members who haven’t, to submit their timesheets.

All approved or rejected timesheets and expenses will be visible in the Archive tab, where you can filter them by date, team, and status.

Scheduling

In Clockify you can make schedules in two ways:

• by allocating people to projects (Project View)
• by allocating projects to people (Team View)

However you make your schedules, you will see the same information in both views.

In the Project View, you start by adding projects to the list and then allocating people to them.

This view is perfect if your starting point is a time estimate or a project deadline, so you know how much time to allocate daily, weekly, or monthly.

Here you can also add milestones to a project timeline and mark any important dates or events.

When creating an assignment, you can set its start time, mark it as billable, repeat the assignment for “x” number of weeks, and add a personal note for more detailed instructions.

Once published, team members will be able to see their assignments in Calendar and start tracking time on them.

Team view lets you make schedules based on the team’s working capacity. Creating an assignment functions the same as in Project View.

If you schedule someone over their capacity, Clockify will warn you so you can edit the schedule or edit their capacity directly there.

You can still schedule people over their capacity to keep track of overtime hours, and once they track time on the assignment, their overtime hours will appear in the Attendance Report.

Expenses

Whether you’re tracking expenses to bill them to clients, or for your internal recordings, they provide a significant insight into how well you manage your budgets.

Expense categories in Clockify are a way to segment your expenses, and they can represent any frequent expense type that occurs on your day-to-day.

Expenses can be recorded in sum (e.g. Lunch expense), or based on their unit price (e.g. Travel expense with a unit “gas price per mile”).

If an expense is billable, it will be included in the budget of a project that’s tied to it.

You can also submit expenses for approval if they need to be reviewed or corrected.

Invoicing

Clockify gives you a way of billing your services and expenses to clients right from the app.

Invoices are created by choosing which clients to bill, and which projects to import the billable hours and expenses from.

You can also change currencies for each invoice, control which fields will be displayed, and change the legal entity you bill from (if you have multiple).

Each invoice can include taxes or discounts you may have for that client or invoice specifically.

You can customize email templates when sharing an invoice, both when sending it out for the first time and when reminding people.

Once created, you will be able to track invoice status from unsent, sent, paid, partially paid, or overdue.

Partially paid invoices will have a date on which the payment was made and its amount, so you know how much remains to be paid.

Edit profiles & Bulk edit

Bulk editing allows you to edit multiple entries, projects, and users at once.

Example: You can bulk edit daily working capacity for multiple people at the same time. Or add a new task to multiple projects at once.

Lock time & Add for others

To ensure your time logs and recorded expenses stay accurate, you can use timesheet locking after a certain time period or a specific date.

This will prevent regular users from changing previous entries.

You can lock entries before a specific day in the year, automatically set weekly or monthly locking days, or lock all entries older than “x” number of days, weeks, or months. 

However, as an admin, you can see your team’s timesheets and add time on their behalf, even after the time has been locked.

You can do that in the member’s Timesheet or Calendar, or in the Detailed Report for multiple people at once.

Manager roles

Your processes will be better optimized if you make sure everyone has the right permissions to manage work based on their level of responsibility.

In Clockify there are multiple role levels: Owner, Admin, Project Managers, Team Managers, and Regular Users.

Each role has a different set of permissions, but Manager roles are crucial for optimal project, task, and team management. 

Delegating manager roles helps you speed up the approval process (timesheet, expenses, or time off approval), and better your project management (optimal scheduling decisions, budget control, etc.).

Hide time & pages

You can set different access permissions for different users, so some users won’t be able to see other people’s entries or see projects, teams, or reports.

Example: Not all users need access to Reports, as it’s mostly used by Admins and Managers.

Single sign-on

Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication system that enables users to log in to multiple tools with a single ID and password.

Clockify can connect to your single sign-on system, so your team can still use one way to log in to it. You would just need to add a custom subdomain for your organization.

Clockify supports SAML2 and OAuth2 protocols used by all major identity providers (OneLogin, Okta, Bitium, Azure, Rippling, JumpCloud, Google, Azure, Okta, Facebook, Github, etc.).

Two-factor Authentication

If you’re paying additional attention to security, Clockify gives you an option to enable 2FA for users to type in a code sent to their email address, prior to log-in.

Data regions

Instead of just globally, your data can be stored in different geographic regions, which is often needed for legal compliance with national laws and regulations.

While you’re creating a new account, you can choose from the following regional locations for you to store data in the USA, Australia, Germany, or the UK.

How to test out all the extra features?

If you aren’t sure Clockify’s extra features will be right for your team, you can activate a free trial for 7 days and test out features yourself. No credit card is required.

Be sure to explore all Clockify features in-depth and check out our other guides for more information.

How to create a new Clockify account?

These are the steps for setting up your new free Clockify account:

1. Go to https://clockify.me/   
2. Click the “Sign up free” on the Clockify home screen (top right corner)
3. Insert your credentials (email and password) in the Sign-up modal
4. Get to know our Terms of Use, and check the “I agree to the Terms of Use” box

Clockify offers you to store your data in different geographic regions. The default option is the Global region, but you can choose between: Global, Europe (Germany), USA, United Kingdom, and Australia.

So, instead of hosting your data on a global server, you can store them exclusively in a specific region, to abide by data residency laws and additionally speed up app performance.

Choosing a plan

If you opened a free account, and now you want to switch to one of our paid plans, you can do that right from the initial home screen.

When you click on the Upgrade button, you will get an option to choose between the plans, and the subscription option (monthly or annually), or activate a free trial.

The annual subscription is more affordable in the long term than the monthly billing option.

Then, you will type in the number of seats (people) you want to have on a plan.

Then you will proceed to the actual payment, where you will type in your card information and a relevant email address for the invoice to be sent to.

How to set up your Clockify workspace?

When you create a Clockify account, one workspace will be automatically created for you.

If you need more than one workspace (e.g. you want a separate workspace for each team or different types of projects), just click “Manage”, and you will get an option to add a new one with a different name.

Each workspace will then have its own settings and team members who will not be able to access data from other workspaces.

The first step to personalizing your workspace is to explore the settings and customize them for your needs.

To personalize your workspace view, explore the Profile settings.

Profile settings

In the Profile settings, you will be able to add your profile picture and personal information (name, email, password).

Profile settings give you the ability to set your personal preferences on, for example, time zone, language, date format, or week start day.

All other Clockify users in your workspace will also have the option to set up their own personal settings that will affect their workspace view.

When you make sure all the settings are set in the right way, you can start incorporating your business data.

Workspace settings

The first thing you need to set up is how your time-tracking data will be organized throughout your workspace.

Depending on the type of your business, you might want to categorize your time-tracking data differently.

Categorizing time

Clockify lets you categorize and analyze time using a 4-level hierarchy: clients, projects, tasks, and description.

If you wish to categorize time differently, you can rename Project, Client, and Task labels into something else.

E.g. Larger organizations might want to categorize their time by Projects, which are part of a Department, which are assigned to a Location.

For further categorization, you can also use tags, which work regardless of the hierarchy.

You can create tags for any type of time entries you want to later filter out much more easily in the Reports.

For example, you can create an “Overtime” tag, and when you track your work, your overtime hours can be marked with an Overtime tag. 

Other than that, in the workspace settings, you can set all the general settings related to your workspaces, for example:

• Working days for your team
• Workspace billable rate – applies to all billable time entries, until you set a more specific billable rate.
• Workspace cost rate – applies to all entries (billable and non-billable) to calculate your labor costs, until you set a more specific team member cost rate.
• Currency format (e.g. 50 USD or USD 50) and data format (e.g. 1,000.00 or 1.000,00).
• Many other settings…

Also, here you can activate new features since some of them are not automatically activated (e.g., timesheet, kiosk, invoicing, expenses).

You can activate only features that are included in your subscription plan.

Required fields

Clockify gives you the option to set up fields that need to be filled in in order for a time entry to be saved.

By default, you can choose to set Project, Task, Tag, or Description fields as required.

All required fields will have a little * sign next to them.

And if you create any additional custom fields, you can mark those as required, too.

Custom fields give you a way to collect further information on time entries while members are tracking their work.

For example, if your company operates in shifts, you might need your employees to fill in their shift numbers when their timer is running.

Time rounding

Before you run any reports for your recorded time entries, you can set up for your time entries to be rounded to a whole number, and later in the Reports switch turn the rounding on or off.

You can choose for time entries to be:

• Rounded up
• Rounded down
• Rounded to the nearest whole number

A referring value for time rounding can be 1 minute, 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 4 hours.

Approval & lock time

If you want to ensure your teams’ tracked time and expenses are reviewed and approved, you need to first enable the Approval feature.

Then, you should choose the appropriate approval period: weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly.

This setting will reflect on the timesheet view when you’re submitting it, and on the displayed dates when approving timesheets or expenses.

To make sure users can’t edit their past time entries and expenses, you can enable time locking after a certain date and set it as recurring each month, for example.

Permissions & roles

Before you invite all the team members and assign them adequate roles, make sure that all the permissions for specific roles are set as you want in the Workspace settings.

In short, there’re four types of roles in Clockify:

• Owner – a person who created a workspace and who can add/remove Admins
• Admins – who can see and edit everything
• Managers – who can manage people and projects
• Regular users – who can track time and see reports

On the Permissions tab in the Workspace settings is where you will manage:

• Who will be able to see what (e.g. regular users can’t see reports) 
• Who can create clients, projects, tasks, tags, and assignments (in the schedule)

After you have all the permissions for the roles set as you wish, you can proceed to invite team members.

Managing team members

Depending on whether you want to activate and use the Kiosk feature, you can add full or limited members.

A full user can access all active Clockify features, while a limited user can only use Clockify through a kiosk – to clock in and out of work hours.

To add a full user, you would need their name and email address. For limited users, you only need to add a name.

While you’re adding team members, you can right away assign them adequate roles in Clockify to manage who can do what.

You can also organize team members in Groups, and when a new team member joins, you can give them access to certain projects just by assigning them to a group, instead of doing it manually.

On the Team page, you can customize and edit each member’s profile.

You can set different working days and daily work capacities (e.g. 4h for part-time employees) for each member.

And if you need any further information on each employee, go to the Workspace settings and create custom user fields.

Your custom user fields can be a simple text field, a number, a link, a switch button, or a single or multiple selection list.

When you add your active custom user fields, you will see that information in their profile settings.

Managing clients

You can create as many clients (departments, or any other custom category you’ve set) to group the work done on projects.

When you type in a new client name, you will get the option to add other information such as email address, postal address, and custom notes.

Tying your tracked hours to projects and clients will help you filter out just the information you need in the reports.

Managing projects

Projects in Clockify will group your total tracked time, help you filter out the reports, and give you insight into the work tied to a project or a client.

When creating a project, you can assign it to a specific client, give it a color to easily distinguish it from other projects, and set it as public or private to determine who can track time on it.

Public projects will be accessible to all, while private projects will only be visible to certain users.

For example, you can create a special project to plan a surprise party for a colleague and mark it visible to people who participate in its planning.

For private projects, you can add each member one by one in the Access tab.

To manage a project’s profitability, you should set its billable and cost rate, and you will be able to track the profits and costs it generates.

If you want to go one step further and enable different cost and billable rates for each task, you need to enable it first in the Workspace settings.

Then you will be able to set different rates for each task.

Besides that, to make sure you stay within budget and deadline and actually follow the progress on a project, you need to add its time and budget estimates.

Whether you set estimates for a project as a whole, or for each task individually, Clockify will let you know how much time and money you have left to finish them.

Besides, if you use the forecasting feature, Clockify will also warn you about exceeding the deadline or the budget.

Managing rates

Tracking the profitability and the cost of your work will require you to set your billable and cost rates.

The difference between the two is that cost rates are applied no matter if the entries are marked as billable or not. This rate is used to calculate the cost of your labor.

Billable rates are applied to billable entries only. This rate is used to calculate the profitability your work generates.

Depending on how specific you want to set your rates, they can be managed on different levels:

• Workspace rate, which you define in Workspace settings.
• Member rate, which you define on the Team page for each team member.
• Project rate, which you define for each project in Project settings.
• Task rate, which you define for each task on a project, but it first needs to be enabled in Workspace settings.
• Projects’ member rate, which you define in the projects’ Access tab for each member on a project.

The main rule for rates is this: less specific rates get overridden by more specific rates.

The least specific rate is a Workspace rate, and the most specific is a Project’s member rate.

For example, if you set a Member’s rate, but you get a new project with a higher budget, you will probably set a more specific Project’s member rate for the same person. Then, profits from that person will be calculated based on the Project’s member rate.

Setting rates will allow you to see your costs, earnings, and profit in the Reports section.

Managing reminders

When you set the estimate for your projects, you can also set alerts to let you know when you’re getting closer to the deadline or the budget.

Before starting tracking your time, you can set reminders for that too.

You can choose which team members need to track a certain amount of hours, on which days, and who will be notified if that target is not being met.

If you’re using Clockify desktop apps or browser extensions, you can also set a reminder that you forgot to start tracking your time.

You just need to set your working days, working hours, and after how much time you want to receive a reminder if you forget to start it.

For example, if your working days are Monday – Friday between 9 am – 5 pm, and you haven’t started the timer for 30 minutes, you’ll get a notification. 

Calendar syncing

If you want to have all events in one place, just connect your Clockify calendar with Google or Outlook calendars.

You can then start the timer or create an entry from an event directly from a Calendar.

Time tracking options

In Clockify you can track time via a tracker, timesheet, auto tracker, or kiosk.

Tracker is automatically activated when you create a new account, but if you want to use Timesheet or a Kiosk you first need to enable them in the Workspace settings.

And if you want to use the Auto tracker, you need to download the desktop app for your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux).

How do you know which time-tracking method you need?

The tracker mode lets you start and stop the timer when you finish the work done on a specific task, and mark it as billable or non-billable.

You can choose the project and a task you’re working on, and be as specific as you want when describing the activity.

You can use the timer mode with a button, or the manual mode to enter start and end times yourself.

As you start and stop the timer, time entries will populate your timesheet.

You can also prevent users from adding time manually and editing their existing time entries by enabling the “Force timer” option in the Workspace settings.

The timesheet mode allows you to enter the total hours spent on projects.

For example, if you know that you will work on one project or a task the whole week, the quickest way to record your working hours, in that case, will be through a timesheet.

Timesheets can be submitted for review and approval, to make sure hours and tasks on the project are recorded as agreed.

For example, you could use submitting & reviewing timesheets to check if all tasks are correctly marked as billable or non-billable, to avoid billing clients for the unbillable tasks.

Another way to track your work hours is through the Auto tracker.

The auto-tracker will automatically count the time you spend on each web page or app, so it is especially useful when switching between tools and tabs.

You can set it to start tracking time as soon as you turn on the computer, so you won’t have to remember to start the timer yourself.

Then, you can review the recorded time slots (visible only to you) and choose which ones you want to save as time entries on Clockify and edit them if needed.

Time tracking through a Kiosk mode will give you the option to set up various clock-in stations for your team distributed in different locations.

With a kiosk, each team member can clock in and out of work time, and record their breaks. 

However, it does not allow you to switch between projects. When you create a kiosk, you choose its default project.

However you choose to track your time, Clockify will collect and sync all the data from all the devices.

Managing time off

Employee time off can be managed through Holidays and custom time off Policies.

You can set your custom Holidays depending on the country your business is in and which Holidays are usually celebrated.

For other time off policies, you can create as many as you need.

For example, Paid Vacation and Earned days for all employees. Paid Vacation for employees to use their annual vacation, and Earned policy to compensate them for overtime hours.

You can create time off policies to be expressed in hours or days, to require approval, and allow negative balance for employees to request time off even if they don’t have it on their balance.

As employees take their time off, you will be able to track their remaining balance, see on a timeline who is absent and for how long, and add to their balance manually. 

Managing expenses

Depending on the nature and the size of your business, you will have different expenses.

Nevertheless, you can place your expenses into different categories and record them as unit-based or in total amounts, as well as attach receipts to them.

If some expenses will be expressed in total amount, e.g. Lunch, your expense category will only have a name.

So, when you’re recording an expense tied to that category, you will type a total amount.

If, on the other hand, your expense category has a unit price, you will need to set it up in order to calculate the total amount of that expense.

E.g. You want to record an expense for mileage, you drove 10 miles for the In-house project.

And then, once you record an expense for that category, it will look like this.

Clockify will then calculate the total amount for an expense.

Expenses can be submitted for approval and approved if all recorded information seems in order.

When an expense is linked to a particular project, the budget of that project will extract the expense amount, ensuring that the remaining budget is always accurate.

Your expenses can then be imported to your invoices together with the billable hours, or you can extract a separate Expense report for detailed expense review.

Here you will be able to filter them out by team members, clients, projects, categories, dates, and more.

Managing invoices

Invoicing in Clockify lets you customize invoice appearance and the data you include.

In the invoice settings, you can set up your default values for the:

• Taxes – the percentage and whether you will include one or two
• Taxation mode – whether the second tax will be calculated on the total amount or on the taxed amount
• Billing entity – a default billing entity you will bill from (if you have multiple legal entities)
• Billing deadline – a default number of days upon which an invoice should be paid
• Email templates – default email templates for sending out invoices and invoice reminders
• Invoice items – you can set custom names for your invoice items (e.g. if you have clients from different countries, you can use the translated invoice items)

You can also control the appearance of your invoices, which columns to display, whether the text will be displayed from left to right, or right to left, and add your company logo.

When you want to create an invoice, you will first choose a client, and then appropriate dates for the issue and due date.

Then you will import billable entries and expenses from projects, a time period to look from, and choose how that data will be displayed.

Once created, you can track invoice status to know which ones were sent/unsent, paid, partially paid, or overdue.

Install Clockify apps

If you prefer using the app instead of the web version, you can download and install it on your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux) or mobile device (iOS, Android). 

If not, you can use Clockify solely through the web interface, or browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Edge).

Whichever method is more convenient to you, all data will be synced.

Explore all the features Clockify offers in each plan to get what’s best for your team.

Poor resource planning creates bottlenecks in your workflows. Bottlenecks can be anything that unnecessarily prolongs or delays your processes.

When we say “resources”, we mean time, money, and people – the most important assets of any business.

Ineffective time, money, and people management hinder your productivity, competitive performance, and profitability.

Whether you manage a one-person business, a small or a large team, you need to know where yours/your team’s time and money go and minimize bottlenecks.

For example, if one of the team members gets sick and you need to find a replacement quickly.

If you don’t have the information on each team member’s daily attendance or time off data, and their work capacity at a glance, you will need much more time to find a replacement, and maybe eventually don’t even get the job done.

On the contrary, effective resource planning sets a strong foundation for stable processes and continuous growth.

So in the same scenario of an employee getting sick – if you know who is free to cover them, and for how long – finding a replacement will be done within seconds.

What are the benefits of effective resource planning?

Effective resource planning ensures that your efforts are used to their fullest potential.

Here are some of the most obvious benefits of effective resource planning.

Cost optimization

Effective resource planning helps in controlling costs by identifying the overall budget you have at your disposal and carefully distributing it across the whole project duration and tasks.

Improved decision-making

Effective resource planning enables organizations to make informed decisions by providing accurate information on the availability and allocation of resources. This helps you in task prioritization and better people management.

Increased efficiency and productivity

By identifying and reducing bottlenecks, you will be able to clearly communicate and implement changes – and streamline your processes. When everyone knows their task, and knows it quickly, it will result in faster completion of tasks and projects.

Improved customer satisfaction

Effective resource planning ensures that the right resources are available at the right time, leading to the timely delivery of results. This improves customer satisfaction and builds a competitive advantage.

How to use Clockify for effective resource planning?

Clockify enables you to effectively distribute resources across projects and tasks.

Here is the list of Clockify features that will help you improve your resource planning.

Team

Starting from your team’s working days and hours –  you can set different working days and daily working capacities for each team member.

To have more complete information on each team member, you can add custom user fields for information such as employment type (full-time or part-time), or employee ID.

Team members can be organized in groups, which makes managing people on projects easier.

Instead of adding people to a project one by one, you can create a group and assign it to a project in one click.

Time off

Clockify gives you an opportunity to manage employee absences by creating custom time off policies.

Create a new policy, select the members to whom it applies, and specify whether it will be expressed in days or hours.

Then, as employees start requesting their time off, you can approve requests and track request history.

Once approved, you can track employee absence for the current and future months from the Timeline tab.

As employees request and use their time off, their balance will automatically change and they can always see their remaining days off right from the Balance tab.

Clockify also allows you to add additional days to employee time off, regardless of their balance state.

For example, if your company practices the “bank of hours” system, and you want to grant days off to employees for their overtime hours, you can do that by tracking their overtime hours and then adding those hours as accrued days.

For example, you can create a special Time off policy called “Earned” and grant employees time off based on their accrued overtime hours.

Scheduling

Clockify lets you plan your team’s time by making schedules in two possible ways:

• by allocating people to projects
• by allocating projects to people

If, for starters, you know that you need 40h a week to be spent working on a project, then you can start planning from a project view.

After adding the project, you can proceed to allocate different team members and their hours to it.

Assigned tasks can be marked as billable or non-billable, and be recurring for a certain number of weeks – which is especially suitable for shift-based workplaces.

Project view lets you visualize project timelines and add milestones for important dates.

However, if you prefer planning from the team’s perspective, and you want to see the capacity of each team member before assigning them to more or less complex projects, then you should start from the Team view.

Add a team member, and then allocate projects accordingly, depending on the team’s daily working capacity and project needs.

To see the team’s daily capacity when making a schedule, you first need to set their daily working capacity.

Then you will be able to see the team’s capacity as “full”, “x hours open”, or “x hours over”, so you know exactly how many hours you can assign them.

After you make and publish schedules, your team can start tracking time on projects or tasks assigned to them right from their Calendar view.

Schedules will also reflect approved time off, so you know who’s available and when.

These are the most popular methods of time tracking in Clockify.

Time tracking

Time tracking in Clockify is done through the:

• Time tracker 
• Timesheet
• Auto tracker
• Kiosk

Time tracker

With the tracker mode, you can specify the details of a task you are working on.

The timer records the beginning and end of your activity, adding to your entries log after you enter a description of your work, the project, and the client.

If you forget to start the timer right away, the manual tracker mode allows you to manually enter the start and end times of past, present, or future tasks.

Timesheet

The timesheet summarizes the work done on each project. Your team can use timesheets to record daily or weekly work activities and submit those timesheets for manager review.

Auto tracker

The Auto tracker helps you track how much time you spend on programs and web browsers while working on a desktop computer.

Only you can see these records, and you can then choose which entries you want to transfer to Clockify web.

Kiosk

The Kiosk can be opened on any internet-connected device. Once it’s launched, team members can log in and start their work or break time.

Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a quick overview of how and where your resources are being spent.

In the Dashboard tab, you can see:

• Total time – the amount of tracked hours on all projects
• Top project – project on which the most time is spent
• Top client – the client on which the most time is spent
• Top activities – most tracked activities on projects and their duration

You can also see which team members are currently working, on what, and for how long.

Location

If your team is working on various locations, and you need to ensure equal coverage on terrain, you can track employee location with Clockify’s GPS tracking.

Clockify GPS tracking gives you information on where your employees are, for how long their timer is running, and where they were moving during the day.

Replaying employee daily routes on a map gives you insight into how to better distribute employees on the field.

Estimates

Working on a project, whether internally or with a client, requires at least a rough, if not exact, estimate of the time and money a project will take.

When you create a project in Clockify, you can set its time and budget estimates, based on which you will be able to track progress.

Forecasting

If you have estimates ready, and you already made schedules for your projects and people, the forecasting feature will bring you one step closer to perfect resource planning.

Forecasting in Clockify will show you the progress you made so far on a project, and if you will go over the estimate and by how much.

The forecasting feature will warn you if it predicts you will go over the estimates, so you can re-schedule your team or make new estimates.

Expenses

You need to take note of all the things that cut down your budget resources.

Clockify allows you to record one-time or occasional expenses, coming from different sources.

You can start by creating a specific expense category, its unit measure, and its value.

When noting down a new expense, tie it to a project, and Clockify will extract that amount from the project’s budget.

Reports 

Reports summarize the total efforts your team put into a project and give you a quick overview of the latest data on resource utilization.

Here are the most useful reports in Clockify if you want to improve your resource planning.

Summary report

The summary report shows you the time you spent on a project, your total costs, and your profit.

You can filter it to display only information for a specific client, project, team members, etc.

Scheduled vs tracked report 

This report compares your employees’ scheduled and tracked time for a given time period, with the calculated difference between the two, so you see how well your schedules are optimized.

Here you can filter out the information for a particular client, a project, a user, or a time period, to get a specific insight on progress.

It shows you how well your team utilizes the time they have at their disposal, and if the tracked hours are the same as scheduled.

Attendance report 

Attendance report shows you the total time your employees spent clocked in, their break time, overtime, and time off.

Based on this report, you can calculate the additional hours or days employees accumulated for their time off.

Effective resource planning: where to start?

The first step towards efficient resource planning is to identify where your organization struggles the most.

• Is it mostly process-oriented, so you need a better understanding of how to organize your work? 
• Is it communication-oriented, so you need to establish a clearer communication system for your team?
• Or, do you lack clear insights into the work that has been done so you know based on what to improve upon?

Make sure to discuss potential improvements with your team, as they will most probably give you the best suggestions based on their own experience.

Once you know the major pain point of effective resource utilization in your team, you can then explore all the possible solutions and scale your business up through the roof.

How to measure the success of your agency?

The most common performance metric for any agency is its utilization rate.

The term ‘utilization’ refers to the effective use of resources, and it demonstrates profitability.

A utilization rate shows the percentage of billable hours compared to the total number of available hours employees have at their disposal.

Insights on utilization rates help you realize which departments/people are oriented towards:

• non-profitable activities (lower than the optimal utilization rate) – necessary, but non-billable tasks;
• profitable activities (higher than the optimal utilization rates, or close to 100%) – you might need to consider hiring new people.

The most common formula for calculating the utilization rate is:

Utilization rate (%) = Total Billable Hours / Total Available Hours * 100

The ideal/optimal utilization rate for agencies is usually around 85% to 90%. But, it depends on what’s the ideal situation for you.

Your ideal utilization rate should enable the right balance between billable tasks and non-billable tasks.

For example, when working on a new project with a new client, your team might need a few extra hours for non-billable activities: research, client meetings, etc.

But, if you take on similar projects from the same client, the majority of your team’s time will be dedicated towards billable tasks – resulting in a higher utilization rate.

So, an ideal utilization rate will vary from project to project. But it should always ensure your agency stays profitable.

How to ensure your agency stays profitable?

Before starting a new project, a good set of pre-defined rules will affect the whole process, a client-agency relationship, your utilization rate – and consequently your profit. 

When acquiring a new project, the first thing to do is to establish a workflow with a client. Both sides need to agree on:

• The deadline,
• The budget,
• Which tasks can be billed and which won’t,
• The final result or measurable milestones,
• The frequency of verbal/written checkpoints.

To ensure each aspect of the established workflow will be implemented, it is recommended to tie it all up to the one place where the actual work gets done.

Keep in mind that a 100% utilization rate is not feasible or desirable. But, a slight increase will result in increased profitability. 

How to use Clockify to increase utilization rates?

Let’s imagine you got a new project. This is what your typical workflow would look like.

1. Add a new client to your database

Your projects are tied to your clients. So when you’re working on a specific task, your work has to be connected to a client.

In the base of your clients, each will have a name, contact information, an address for invoicing, as well as any other specific details you might need to note.

2. Split your project into tasks

To measure your utilization rate, the first thing you need to do is simply establish the work that will impact it, so the basic step would be to – create a project.

In Clockify, each project has a name, a client, and a color assigned to it to visually separate projects from each other.

Projects can be difficult to predict, but dividing them into smaller tasks is the first step toward tackling them.

As your team begins to track time on each of these tasks, you will be able to follow the progress.

To keep track of the progress for each task or a project as a whole, you can set time and budget estimates, but also forecast how the rest of the project will evolve.

Forecasting and progress tracking will enable you to plan ahead when accepting new projects.

A full focus on tasks can sometimes get you to lose sight of the budget and deadline, so you have to find a way to keep everyone aware of the overall progress.

One of the ways in which you can do this is to set alerts in Clockify, which will notify certain team members whenever a project reaches a certain percentage of its estimated time.

If you continuously work on similar projects, it would be useful to save projects as templates and save yourself some time on creating tasks, estimates, assigned teams, billable rates, or any other custom fields.

Then you will have the opportunity to spend more time working on billable tasks.

3. Organize people and assign roles

Resource management is of utmost importance, especially in agencies. Whenever you get a new project, the first thing you will think about is which team members will work on it.

Start from determining the overall number of people needed to complete the project, making sure you don’t overburden your team and stay within the budget.

You need to set billable and cost rates for each person working on a project because that will be the basis for billing your services.

Also, you need to define who will be the main responsible for each part of the project, and delegate some parts of the process to the main responsible team members.

4. Effectively distribute employee time

Effective distribution of employee time will cut down the time you need to complete projects with different deadlines.

Since complex information is much easier to manage when represented visually than as written text, visualization is an important part of project management.

When scheduling team members and organizing them per project, you need to have a visual overview of:

• How many hours you dedicated to each project;
• Which team members are working on which projects, and for how long.

If, for example, someone from your team needs time off, you will need to reorganize your team and reschedule their task responsibilities.

For that reason, you always need to know the working capacity of the whole team and each member.

The capacity of your team is calculated based on the time-tracking targets you set on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Based on the time tracking targets you set for each person or team, you will know who is booked to their full capacity, and who has free hours.

5. Track billable and non-billable tasks

Once your project is split into tasks, and you decided on the team members to be included, the next step is to provide them with the right time-tracking system.

However you choose to track your time, you need to differentiate between billable and non-billable tasks, to later invoice your clients accordingly.

After you agree with a client on what will be billable and what won’t, your team can then proceed to track the time spent on billable or non-billable tasks.

6. Track expenses

Working on a project sometimes requires additional expenses you have to bill, too.

For example, let’s say your client would like to meet in person with the whole team to have an in-person meeting before starting the project.

If that’s not your usual practice – the cost of that trip will probably be something you can charge for.

Clockify lets you record all your expenses which can later be included in an invoice you send to clients.

7. Manage invoices and bill clients

After you’ve done the work, it’s time to send an invoice out to your client.

The following details are a usual part of an invoice you should share with a client:

• Your company information
• Services provided
• Additional expenses
• Date range
• Taxes
• Discounts
• Issue date
• Due date
• Client information

To make sure you manage all the invoices properly and don’t accidentally double-bill clients, you can manage their status (sent/paid/void/unsent) in the invoice list.

8. Sum up your work on the project

Having an overview of which team or team member generates which amount of costs and profit gives guidance on optimal resource allocation. 

Real-time reporting helps you realize whether you need to change something mid-project, to stay within the deadline, or a budget, and gives you insights on how to organize your team for future projects.

Ideally, when summarizing work on a project, reports should show the tracked time for each user, along with:

• the profit they earned (based on the billable rate), and
• the costs associated with their work (based on the cost rate). 

Keeping clients informed of all the work done so far can be represented through Detailed reports.

If, for example, you are charging a retainer fee for some clients, it’s good to know how many hours you have used from the total billable hours of the project.

In Clockify, you can filter the tracked billable and non-billable hours, choose the client and the project you are referring to, and display estimates to compare tracked hours with the total number of hours.

Clients can have up-to-date information if you share a public link to your report. Just filter the data you want to show them and click on the share button to generate a public link.

Track your agency workflow through Clockify

Clockify lets you follow each phase of your work on projects from one place. From concept making to project billing – onboard and easily manage multiple projects at once.

Find out which Clockify features are most useful for your agency by exploring our entire feature list.

To do that, your software development team has to:

• Stay focused
• Write efficient code
• Deal with bugs faster

To actually improve their workflow, you need to understand how they spend their time.

Insights on that will give you guidance on what needs to be improved, and if your team needs support or additional resources in some part of the process.

How do Software Developers use Clockify?

Whenever you get a new project with a limited budget and a firm deadline, you must make sure the workflow is neat and organized.

This is what your typical workflow in Clockify would look like.

1. Create your custom client database

For accurate client billing, you need to tie the work done on a project to its client. So, the first step is to include a new client in your database.

To create a new client, go to the “Clients” tab on the Clockify dashboard and click on “Add new Client”.

Each client has a name, contact information, an address for invoicing, and any other custom details you might need to note.

Once you have your client database ready, you can associate projects with them for easier tracking and accurate billing.

2. Create projects

Now you can start creating the pipeline of your projects.

To create a project in Clockify, you need to give it a name, a client, a color to visually separate it from other projects, and define it as public or private to control visibility.

While public projects are visible to all, private projects are for selected team members only – others won’t be able to track time on it.

Your final project database will show an overview of the most important project information along with the progress bar that will constantly change as people track time on it.

If you often work on the same projects (e.g. multiple mini-projects for the same client) and your tasks are all the same, you can save a project as a template and quickly create a new one from that template.

3. Organize and add team members

Managing people and assigning them projects is easier if you organize people in teams/groups. 

First, you want to make sure each team member has a billable and cost rate set. This is the basis for managing costs and profitability.

Billable rate is an hourly rate used to bill your clients for the total hours spent working on a project, and cost rate is an hourly labor cost used to calculate team paychecks.

In Clockify, projects and tasks can have their own billable rate which will be the same for all team members tracking work on that project or task.

But, you can get even more specific and set the project’s member hourly rate – a different rate for different members working on the same project.

For example, you will probably assign a senior and a junior software developer to work together on the same project, and they will have different billable rates.

See exactly how to set billable hourly rates for your team.

4. Split projects into manageable tasks

In many cases, certain tasks are billed differently or some work needs to be completed without being billed.

For example, the research performed prior to the development, or regular meetings with clients to track and review progress are not usually billed.

That’s why you need to create different types of tasks, and set them to be billable or non-billable.

This way you and the client will be able to accurately track the process and be transparent about where the whole team spent most of their time.

For example, if each team member spends a lot of time on internal communication, then maybe you should consider implementing an alternative tool that will speed up their collaboration.

This gives you insights into what can be improved for future projects.

As your team begins to track time on each of these tasks, you will be able to follow the progress.

5. Control deadline & budget

To regularly track the progress on each task or project and stay in line with the deadline and budget, you should set time and budget estimates for your projects or tasks.

Estimates can be set in total for the whole project, e.g. total budget for the project is $10,000.

Or you can set task-based estimates, e.g. each task will take 20 hours to complete, which could be useful for sprint planning.

You can manipulate manual or task-based estimates for both project time and project budget.

If it’s difficult to predict estimates for the whole project, you can set them for just a month in advance and set them to reset monthly to revisit and change them every month.

The monthly estimate reset is also useful if you have a retainer contract with some clients.

You can distribute the total budget evenly throughout the year to make sure you stay within the limit each month.

6. Schedule tasks across the team

With the scheduling feature, you can assign tasks to team members and set deadlines. This will help keep your team organized and ensure that work is completed on time.

In Clockify, there are two ways of making schedules:

1. Project scheduling
2. Team scheduling

On the project-scheduling view, you can first determine the total number of hours dedicated to that project, and then proceed to assign team members.

On the team-scheduling view, you should allocate each team member a certain number of hours, and then allocate their time to different projects.

Depending on the previously set daily capacity for each member, and the hours you’ve scheduled them, the labels on the team view will vary between full, open, and over.

Either way, whichever view is fitting for you, you will see the same information in both views.

If your team works in sprints, you can easily schedule time blocks of the same duration with a duplicate option or drag & drop, in both views.

7. Start tracking time

Your team can use the Clockify timer to track their work, the timesheet to manually enter time entries, or the auto-tracker to automatically run the timer when they turn on the computer. 

The auto-tracker will automatically count the time you spend on each web page or app, so it is especially useful when switching between tools and tabs.

You can set it to start tracking time as soon as you turn on the computer, so you won’t have to remember to start the timer yourself.

Then, you can review the recorded time slots (visible only to you) and choose which ones you want to save as time entries on Clockify and edit them if needed.

The timesheet mode allows you to enter the total hours spent on projects.

For example, if you know that you will work on one project or a task the whole week, the quickest way to record your working hours, in that case, will be through a timesheet.

Timesheets can be submitted for review and approval, to make sure hours and tasks on the project are recorded as agreed.

For example, you could use submitting & reviewing timesheets to check if all tasks are correctly marked as billable or non-billable, to avoid billing clients for the unbillable tasks.

You can even remind team members to submit their timesheets, and managers to approve them. 

You can also lock timesheets to be locked after a certain date to avoid any additional changes.

Once approved, timesheets cannot be edited.

The tracker feature lets you start and stop the timer when you finish the work done on a specific task, and mark it as billable or non-billable.

You can use the timer mode with a button, or use the manual mode to enter start and end times yourself.

As you start and stop the timer, time entries will populate your timesheet.

8. Integrate with other apps

Clockify integrates with software development tools such as Gitlab, Github, Jira, and many other apps you might use on a daily basis.

Connecting Clockify with other apps will allow you to track time directly from these tools and synchronize data for streamlined project management.

For example, to track time in Jira, you can use the API key or Clockify browser extension  (Chrome, Firefox, Edge).

You can use the Clockify browser extension to track time on any web tool you use for your work.

If you wanna go one step further and extend Clockify functionality to meet your exact needs, see how you can develop your own add-ons and apply them to your Clockify account.

9. Track progress

Once the estimates are set, and the team started tracking time on tasks, you will be able to visually track progress.

Recorded expenses will also be displayed here and distracted from the total budget.

The forecasting tab will show you whether you will stay under the deadline and budget, based on the tracked time, scheduled hours, and estimates.

This will give you insights on whether you need to re-schedule your team or agree with the client to change the estimates.

Also, it will help you determine when the project will end and when team members are available to begin another project.

10. Record expenses

Working on a project sometimes requires additional expenses you have to bill, too.

Depending on the type of software development project, your team may need to incur expenses for hosting, server maintenance, and other infrastructure-related expenses.

Since expenses like that are usually a one-time expense (or for a long period of time), you will need to include them in your invoices, but not as a regular task on a project.

Clockify lets you record all your expenses which can later be included in an invoice you send to clients.

11. Get detailed reports

You can use reports to identify areas where your team may need more support or resources, by looking at where they are spending too much time.

You can compare the hours spent on non-billable versus billable activities, and calculate your utilization rate to evaluate the profitability of your team or certain project types.

Reports in Clockify give you the ability to filter out the work done on specific projects or clients, to display only billable or non-billable tasks, or work done by specific members or teams.

You can round time entries up, down, or to the nearest value to have clean reports before sharing them with a client.

You can set auto-reporting if you want to receive certain reports daily, weekly or monthly.

Just filter out the information you want to include in the report and set up the sharing option.

If the report is set as public, you will be able to share reports with clients or anyone outside of your Clockify workspace by sending them the generated public link.

12. Bill clients

Before billing your clients at the end of each billing period (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly), you need to make sure that all recorded hours are correct and all the right tasks are marked as billable.

You can use the time audit feature to examine which time entries have suspicious duration, and which ones have no project or task tied to them.

Each time entry can be edited in the Detailed Report by an Admin. Once everything is correct, you can proceed to invoice your client.

You can customize your invoices with your company branding and include all the details of the work done and the time spent on each task.

Invoices in Clockify allow you to import billable time and expenses, to count in the taxes or discounts before concluding the invoice.

After it’s created and shared with a client, you can track the invoice status in the list.

The role of Clockify in your Software Development team

Overall, Clockify is a valuable tool for software development teams looking to improve their project management and time-tracking processes.

Clockify gives your team the ability to:

• Categorize work by projects
• Create custom tasks
• Track billable and non-billable tasks
• Integrate with other tools and track time while using them
• Regularly update clients on progress and demonstrate it visually
• Forecast project completion and plan for future projects
• Bill clients for the services
• Gain insights on productivity to improve the process

By using Clockify, you can better manage your team’s time and resources and ensure that your projects are completed on time and within budget.

Check out how Keen, a development agency, benefits from Clockify, or jump straight to the pricing to see which plan is the best option for your team.

A project is “a piece of planned work or an activity which is done over a period of time and intended to achieve a particular purpose”. 

Whatever the type, each project will impose a certain budget and a deadline on your team.

And how well you manage project deadlines and budgets will majorly impact project success.

Besides, you also have to effectively manage task distribution between the team, so everyone knows exactly what they’re doing.

Plus, add to that the constant communication and collaboration happening between your team members during the project.

What if you had everything in one place to help the whole team manage projects successfully?

How to manage projects in Clockify?

Clockify offers a complete set of features to manage projects from their start to finish.

1. Create a project and assign a client

When your team is starting a new project, the first thing you should do is to create it in your base.

And if that project brings in a new client too, you would need to add a new client first.

Then, the work you do on the project is traceable to the client you will later bill for your services.

See how to create projects and clients in Clockify. There’s an option to import clients and projects from your Excel files.

2. Set estimates and reminders

As each project has a deadline and a limited budget at your disposal, it’s good to keep everyone reminded of this crucial part of successful project completion.

In Clockify, you can set time and budget estimates for each project or task you’re working on.

Based on these estimates, you will be able to later visually track progress.

You can also set reminders whenever a project reaches a certain percentage of an estimate.

3. Split the project into tasks

A common way to deal with a project is to split it into smaller portions so each team or team member knows exactly what they need to do.

If a task is done, click on the three dots and mark them as done.

In Clockify you can add as many tasks your team needs – specific or general ones. 

For each task, you can set a billable hourly rate (to see the earnings that task brings) and cost rate (to see the cost working on that task generates).

4. Organize & add team members

Managing human resources is one of the most important parts of managing projects. You need to know the labor cost and profit generated while working on a project.

Check whether you have enough human resources in the team to complete the project and if you decide to add new people, just add their email addresses and assign them an adequate team role.

Here, you can also split your team members into groups for easier task management. With groups, you can assign tasks to the whole group instead of adding each individual.

Cost rates demonstrate the amount of money a working hour of a particular team member costs, while billable rates show the amount of money earned per their working hour.

See how to manage rates to calculate profitability and overall labor costs.

For example, in Clockify there is a difference between admins, managers, and regular users.

• Admins: can see and edit everything
• Regular users: mostly track time
• Managers: can manage projects and approve timesheets

Each of these has different roles and permissions, and they can have different rates, as well.

5. Assign tasks across your team

You can organize people per project, or distribute projects per team member/group, whatever is easier for you.

In both cases, Clockify will allow you to switch between the Project and Team view, keeping the same information you entered.

Underlined projects show that some team member is assigned to work on that particular project on that day, so you have a quick overview of the schedule.

To create a new assignment for a user, just hover over a day and create a new task (user line).

And if you want to set up a project milestone, hover over the colored part of the day (project line).

If you switch to Team view, you will see overall team availability – who has free hours, who is booked to the fool capacity (time tracking target), and who is overbooked.

6. Track project billable and non-billable hours

There needs to be transparency between you and your clients about the time spent on billable tasks (e.g. design, development) and non-billable tasks (e.g. meetings, error fixing), so everything you do on a project should be properly tracked. 

Your team can track the hours they spend working on each project, with a:

• Tracker,
• Timesheet, or
• Auto-tracker.

With the tracker, you can specify what tasks you are working on. The timer records the beginning and end of your activity, adding to your entries log after you enter a description of your work, the project, and the client.

The manual mode allows you to manually enter the start and end times of past, present, or future tasks.

The timesheet summarizes the work done on each project. Your team can use timesheets to record daily or weekly work activities and submit those timesheets for manager review.

The Auto-tracker helps you keep track of how much time you spend on programs and web browsers while working on a desktop computer. Only you can see these records, and you can then choose which entries you want to transfer to Clockify web.

7. Record project expenses

Managing projects sometimes require additional expenses not initially included in the budget.

Clockify lets you record whatever expense you might have during a project – fixed fees (e.g. day rates, retainers, overtime pay, etc.) or unit-based expenses (e.g. mileage, material, meals, etc.)

With expenses, you can:

• create different expense categories,
• give them unit prices, or enter whole amounts,
• attach receipts,
• connect expenses to a project, and
• include them in an invoice.

Expenses can be managed from the web or directly from a mobile app (Android iOS).

8. Track progress

If you’ve entered time and budget estimates for your project, you will be able to track progress on it.

Based on your budget estimate, you will be able to see:

• the amount of tracked billable hours
• Recorded (billable and non-billable) expenses
• Remaining budget, and
• Total tracked (billable and non-billable) hours.

Based on your time estimate, you will be able to see:

• total tracked hours, 
• remaining hours, 
• tracked billable and non-billable, and
• recorded (billable or non-billable) expenses.

9. Forecast progress

Forecasting helps you visualize your project’s progress based on tracked and scheduled time.

If you, for example, schedule more hours than you estimated at the beginning, the forecasting feature will alert you that the project will go over the estimate by ‘x’ hours and the line would be displayed in red.

You can use forecasting to adjust estimates or to adjust team schedules and reassign tasks.

10. Chat with your team

To ensure a project is completed successfully, you need to make sure your team members stay connected. So, it’s safe to say that communication is a complete necessity for project management.

With Clockify, you get access to a free team communication app to:

• Exchange messages
• Make voice and video calls
• Exchange files of any type
• Keep and access files at any time

11. Customize project reports

Regular reporting gives you a clear overview of the overall performance of the project, whether you want to inform clients of the project’s progress or scan through generated costs and profit.

Clockify offers summary, detailed, and weekly reports which can display any date range you need, and filter the data by:

• team/team members.
• clients,
• projects,
• task,
• tag,
• status (billability, approval, invoicing status), and
• description.

If you want to share reports with your clients, just click on a share button and set up a public link to a report where they can follow real-time updates on the project.

12. Bill projects

When all work on the project is completed, you need to invoice your services, and Clockify lets you do that with customizable invoices.

Just import your billable entries and expenses, and your invoice will be ready for clients.

Besides that, here you can manage all the other invoicing information, such as your company and client information, issue and due dates. You can even add taxes and discounts.

All your invoices will be in the invoice list so you can have an overview of their status (sent, paid, unsent, overdue).

Manage projects with ease

Clockify facilitates project management for the whole team. You can effectively organize tasks across team, follow the progress and stay sure that you are within the budget and deadline.

With Clockify, you can choose from four different plans, each suitable for different projects and organizations of varying sizes.

We recommend the PRO plan as it has all the advanced features for successful project management.

See which plan might be the best option for your team.

Does your business operate in multiple locations or in a shift-based setting? Are your employees often moving from working sites or client locations?

If so, you need to ensure a way of capturing all employee billable hours at all times, no matter where they are.

One of the possible solutions is a clock-in kiosk that can track employee work hours in multiple locations. It’s a system established through a single device enabling multiple people to record their work hours.

Another way is to use a mobile app (iOS, Android) that permits time tracking on the go, with an additional GPS tracking feature to record employee routes during the day.

For example, if your business owns multiple mechanical shops, you will set up a different kiosk station at each location for employees to track their hours.

And if any of the workers need to occasionally visit the warehouse for restocking, their working hours spent getting from one place to another can be tracked through a mobile app.

This way you will have all employee billable hours synced on their timesheets and ready for payroll.

Clockify’s kiosk: the basics

Clockify’s kiosk gives you the ability to:

Have multiple active kiosks

You can create multiple kiosks for different job sites and distribute employees accordingly.

Clock in with a personal PIN code and a universal PIN code

Users need to type in a PIN code to clock in. A personal PIN code is unique to a user, but universal PIN codes can be used to clock in and out for anyone.

Track breaks

You can clock in for break time the same way you clock in for work time.

Customize session duration

Once launched, a kiosk will be active for 24h by default, but you can change the session duration in the settings.

Brand your kiosk

Instead of showing the Clockify logo, you can display your own company logo on a kiosk.

Launch it on any device – desktop, mobile, or tablet.

When onboarding new users, you want to keep in mind the difference between full and limited kiosk users.

A limited user can only use Clockify via a kiosk, while a full user can use features such as timer, timesheet, reports, time off, or any other feature from a plan you opted for.

Here is a short overview of the distinction between full and limited kiosk users.

See the pricing difference for full and limited kiosk users.

Now that you know the basics, let’s see how to set up and use Clockify’s kiosk.

How to set up & launch a kiosk

First, log in to your Clockify workspace on the web, and go to the Kiosk tab in the sidebar (it’s enabled by default).

To create a new kiosk, you should give it a name, assign people who will track time on that kiosk, and choose a default project that will be shown during employees’ clock-in and out.

A kiosk is (by default) set as active for 24h, but you can change the session duration in the settings to meet the specific work hours of each team working on different sites.

For example, the Northern Warehouse might need to work in two or more shifts during some period of time, so you can edit the kiosk to shut down after 36h, or more.

This way your kiosk will remain open during that time frame for as long as employees need to come and leave their job site.

To start tracking time, users need to enter their personal or universal PIN code.

A universal PIN code can be used to log in instead of any user (except the Admin). Each user will still get their own personal PIN code.

For example, you can share a universal PIN code with a shift manager, so they can log in for any other member if needed.

A list of all PIN codes can be exported for internal records.

User PIN codes can also be edited on the Team’s page.

To launch a kiosk, choose a device you want to use as a clock-in kiosk – computer, tablet, or phone – and copy the kiosk link on its browser.

How to use a kiosk

Once a kiosk is launched on its device, each user should select their name from the list and clock in with their personal PIN code.

A forgotten PIN can also be replaced with the Admin’s assistance, if you just click on the “Forgot your PIN?” link. The Admin will receive an email and you will be able to reset your PIN.

To start counting your work hours, click on the “Clock-in” button, and type in your PIN code once again.

The same goes for starting your break. Click on the “Start break” button, type your PIN, and the break time will start.

To clock out, click on the “Clock out” button and enter your PIN code.

So, each time you want to start and stop the timer, you have to enter your PIN code.

When users clock in and out of the kiosk, the project for which they track time is automatically determined by the kiosk’s default project (switching projects on the kiosk will be available in the future).

If you want users to switch from projects and track time on them, the best option is to use the mobile app (Android, iOS).

Personalized mobile time tracking

With a mobile app, your employees can track via a timer or a timesheet on their own mobile phone, and they can also specify the projects they are working on.

A mobile app also gives you the ability to track employee locations if they’re moving from one working location to another.

If your employees will track time on their mobile, you should create a list of projects from which they can choose.

Then, when employees enter their mobile app, they will be able to select one from the list of projects and start the timer.

Categorizing time by projects, clients, and tasks will make it easier to filter and display the right information in the reports.

By default, time-tracking data in reports is organized through clients, projects, and tasks, but you can change it to something that better fits your business, such as department, location, job site, etc.

If you want to see which users are currently clocked in (via kiosk, mobile app, web, or desktop) and on which project, go to the Dashboard tab and check active users in the activity table.

Before employees start tracking time on their work, you can use scheduling to assign them a specific task or a project.

Once you publish the schedule, they will see their assignments on Clockify mobile calendar and can then start tracking time on them.

Preparing for payroll will demand you to go over the tracked time and review if each user reported their work hours correctly.

Clockify gives you access to a variety of reports, which you can customize for your needs.

You can customize and export reports by day, week(s), month(s), and even for a whole year.

Time & attendance reports

Attendance & overtime

At the end of each day, you can check the Attendance report to see individual user activity during the day – start, end times, overtime, breaks, time off, and total hours they worked.

The attendance report allows you to see if some employees came in early or late, how much break time was taken, and who has overtime or time off during the week.

Time off

To manage employee time off, you should create vacation policies that apply to your company – paid vacation, earned vacation, maternity leave, sick days, etc.

For each policy, you must determine the people to which that policy applies.

For example, a Paid Vacation policy will apply to all employees, while maternity leave would apply to female team members only.

Those employees would then be able to request time off, while their team managers (or specific members) will approve or reject those requests.

Adding days off to the user’s balance will accrue to the total days off they have at their disposal.

Time off balance for each employee can be tracked visually – you can see used, accrued, and available days at a glance.

The time off data will be visible on the Attendance report – you can see the hours someone requested as time off during the day. See more on how to set daily or hourly time off policies.

Customize & export reports

If you need more detailed information contained in your reports, here’s how to create custom user fields.

Once created, custom user fields will be visible in reports.

Before exporting, you can filter out the information shown on the Reports page by kiosk, user, dates, location, job area, or any other data you wish to see, and round time entries for cleaner reports and easier payroll calculations.

Time entries can also be filtered with or without breaks, and edited to make sure each user has a recorded break entry of a specific duration – if that’s important for your payroll process.

Reports can be exported as PDF, Excel, or CSV files to import into your payroll system.

Time tracking takeaways

Before opting for any of the time tracking methods, make sure to think about the nature of your business.

If your employees spend their whole daily working hours in one location and one particular project/task – then Clockify’s clock-in kiosk would be perfect for your business.

But, if they need to track time on different projects/tasks, or if they change locations during the day, then their working hours would be best recorded with the help of a mobile app.

Check out more on setting up & using Clockify kiosks, or mobile apps.

If your business operates in the territory of the USA or has a contract with a governmental agency, you must follow the timekeeping and labor management rules established by the US Department of Labor (DOL) and the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA).

If your business operates in the territory of the US and falls into categories covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), you are probably already familiar with the requirements it sets.

The FLSA has set out guidelines for regular employees (salaried employees) or independent contractors (hourly-based employees) regarding: 

• Obligatory timekeeping,
• Overtime,
• Wage minimum,
• Recordkeeping, and
• Child labor.

On the other hand, if you are the type of business that establishes a contract with a governmental agency – for the exchange of some kind of goods or services, you have to follow the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) rules.

It is DCAA’s responsibility to ensure your company complies with timekeeping and accounting regulations, and it can audit your business to make sure:

• Practice daily time tracking,
• Keep precise records with audit trails for all changes,
• Practice extensive reporting,
• Obtain specific supervisor approvals and more.

The European Union also has certain timekeeping rules, aimed at protecting the health and safety of employees, making tracking overtime and break time a crucial part of complying with the directive.

According to the EU’s Working Time Directive, employers in the EU have to ensure minimum standards considering:

• Weekly working hours,
• Daily and weekly rest,
• Breaks,
• Annual leave,
• Overtime, and
• Extra protection for night work. 

However, the implementation of this directive differs from state to state and national labor laws established in each EU country.

How Clockify makes compliance effortless

Clockify’s functionalities help you to:

• Manage employee information,
• Track employee working hours,
• Track employee overtime,
• Approve employee timesheets,
• Manage employee absence,
• Get instant reports on employees and tracked time,
• Audit the records and trace changes.

Manage employee information

According to the FLSA, employers must keep certain information about their employees, no matter the employee type.

With Clockify, you can customize the data you keep on each employee with custom user fields.

These custom user fields can later be visible in reports, too. When exporting a detailed time record for employees, you just need to check which fields you want to export and see in Excel and CSV.

FLSA also implies that you need to keep a record of hourly rates for employees.

Track employee working hours

To continuously track work hours and stay compliant with time-tracking rules in your country, you need to select the best time-tracking method that works for your team.

Clockify provides you with options of using a timer, timesheet, auto-tracker, or a kiosk.

Whichever time-tracking method you choose, you can record (and export) the data on your:

• Working hours,
• Breaks,
• Workweek duties,
• Work-day start and end,
• Work-week start and end.

See short explanations for each Clockify time-tracking method.

• Tracker lets you be specific about the tasks you are working on. You can enter a specific description of your work, the project, and the client it relates to, and the timer will record the start and the end of your activity, adding to the log of your entries.

Or you can switch to manual mode and enter the start and end times for past, present or future tasks.

• Timesheet summarizes the work you’ve done on a project. You can use a timesheet to record your daily or weekly work activities and submit those timesheets for manager approval.

• Kiosk lets you record the start of the workday, the end of it, and the breaks taken in between with your personal PIN code. It also summarizes the total amount of time an employee worked during the day, and the total time for breaks taken.

• Auto-tracker allows you to automatically record the time you spend on programs and web browsers visited during your work on a desktop computer. These records are visible to you only, and you can then choose which entries you will transfer to Clockify web to fill in your timesheet.

Whether you use one way to track your time or combine multiple, all data will be synchronized in your timesheet – whichever device you use.

Track employee overtime

By the DCAA and EU’s timekeeping requirement, all overtime must be recorded, regardless of whether employees are paid by the hour or have fixed salaries. And to comply with FLSA overtime pay rules, you first have to record overtime work.

In Clockify, you can set daily/weekly/monthly time tracking targets, so every minute over the set target will be marked as overtime.

You can easily have an overview of what’s been scheduled, who worked how much, and how much of it was overtime.

Besides that, the same report shows you the start, end, and break times for each employee.

Free Overtime Pay Calculators

Approve employee timesheets

The DCAA states that “both the employee and the supervisor need to review and approve the time records”.

This means you need a proper approval system for employee working hours, with two-step timesheet verification.

After entering their working hours, employees can submit their timesheets for approval – signaling that they reviewed them.

The admins or assigned team managers can then proceed to review it and approve it, or reject it if it needs to be corrected.

Timesheet approval in Clockify can be done on a weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly basis, so make sure to set it to match your accounting processes.

The other option is to go to the Detailed Report and correct the entry by themselves, to cut down on the time for the whole process.

Admins can use the reminders feature to remind all members to submit their timesheets, and all team managers to approve them.

Manage employee absence

Depending on your team, your company’s time off policies can be in regard to national holidays, sick leaves, vacations, personal or parental leave, or any other absence policy you create for your employees.

Clockify lets you select certain dates as holidays and define those dates as non-working days.

Besides that, you can create custom time off policies, manage employee time off requests, and track accruals and overall balance.

Your time-off policies can be customized in Clockify to details, so you can even:

• Allow hourly or half-day leaves, instead of whole days off.
• Allow negative balances, so team members can request time off even if they don’t have enough available days or hours.

This way, your employees can combine hourly, half-days, or whole days off – and it will all be recorded and automatically updated in Clockify.

Get instant reports on employees and tracked time

The DCAA states that time reports have to be produced at least every month (if not more frequently).

For FLSA recordkeeping compliance, Clockify allows you to generate comprehensive reports with just a few clicks, and keep them within the system for as long as necessary.

With Clockify, you can export reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or for any date range that suits your organization. You can filter the data you wish to include in a report – users, teams, projects, clients, tasks, etc.

As FLSA allows it, you can adjust the time entries with the rounding feature to the nearest whole number, up or down, and then export your report.

Audit the records and trace changes

The DCAA states that “if approved (i.e. locked) timesheets are changed, you have to have an immutable record of all the changes and an audit trail (so that it’s clear what has been changed, when, and why)”.

Clockify provides you with the ability to lock timesheets after a certain date, to prevent any changes.

However, if something has to be changed after the set date, with the audit log you will have a record of what’s been changed and where.

If you want to minimize checking and error fixing, you can set up required fields to prevent users to save time entry without the crucial information you need for reporting or administration purposes, e.g.: project, task, tag, or description.

The benefits of time tracking

While respecting all the rules is an absolute necessity, it’s good to remind ourselves of all the benefits time-tracking can have for ourselves and our organizations.

Benefits for employees

Some of the benefits of time tracking for employees include:

• Fair time tracking for fair payments – If you work overtime, your time tracking system will be there to record it, providing accurate information for overtime pay.
• Protection from mal-functioning work environments – Your right to take a break is both a requirement and a necessity, so make sure to regularly take break time to stay healthy and avoid overworking.

Benefits for employers

Apart from providing a solid basis for compliance with laws and regulations, some of the benefits of time tracking for employers include:

• Organized and accurate records to facilitate payroll,
• Overview of team’s performance, labor cost and profit, and expenses.

Resources

Read more about FLSA, DCAA and EU’s timekeeping compliance:

FLSA Working Time Regulation

DCAA Compliant Timekeeping

EU Time Tracking Law

DISCLAIMER: Using a time tracking system such as Clockify does not automatically make you compliant with the time tracking laws. You need to make sure you’re using the software correctly. We advise consulting with legal experts.

But now you wish to implement Clockify in other departments, as well.

You can do that by adding the rest of the team to the existing workspace, or by creating a new workspace for each team division – dividing it in any way you see fit.

Depending on how closely different teams cooperate on the same projects, it might or might not make sense to organize your work in one or multiple workspaces.

In this guide we will explain details in both cases, so you can see what is the best option for your team.

Multiple workspaces: possibilities & limitations

When working on multiple workspaces, you want to keep in mind how closely different teams cooperate on the same project and agree on:

• Who will work on what,
• Which activities will be billable and which won’t.

This way you prevent double billing or billing for activities that should not be charged.

Billing status can also be tracked from the Invoices tab (explained below).

With multiple workspaces, you can:

• Ensure that users won’t be able to change settings on other workspaces – other projects.
• Avoid assigning roles and creating groups, as only users from that team will be in the workspace.

But, depending on the team size and complexity of the project, you might still want to narrow down the team to smaller groups and assign them roles. 

With multiple workspaces, you can’t:

• Have all the tracked time, overall profit, and costs for the whole company in one place.

Keeping track of billable and non-billable hours on projects, and generated profit or costs on multiple workspaces will spread out the data you will, at some point, need in one place.

So, when you wish to analyze the whole profit or costs for the whole company, you will have to export reports from different workspaces and combine them outside of Clockify to get the insights you need.

One workspace: possibilities & limitations

Having everything in one workspace will make it easier to track. Since everything is in one place, you can use filtering to generate custom reports for certain projects, clients, dates, etc.

With one workspace, you can:

• See all tracked time, for all projects and clients on the Reports page where you use filtering to display the data you need.
• Organize team members in groups (teams), and designate whole projects to individuals or a group of people.
• Appoint team members as team managers and project managers so they would be able to look over projects and teams.
• Restrict who can track time on certain projects by setting them as private, so only people that are part of the project (assigned as individuals or as a group) can track time on it. This is with the exception of admins and the workspace owner.

With one workspace, you can’t:

• Apply different workspace settings to different projects.

One of the potential issues with one workspace is if admins or managers unintentionally change something that will reflect on all team members or projects (e.g. team member cost rate, which will reflect on their paycheck).

In most cases, workspace settings can’t be overridden. However, there are some exceptions.

Does your team need more than one workspace?

Here is the list of settings that are unique to a workspace, and that will reflect further down the process.

Examine to see if some are of great importance to your workflow. If so, having multiple workspaces might be a better option for your team.

Project’s DEFAULT billable status

• If you have a lot of projects which are either billable or non-billable, their default billability status can be set in workspace settings. So, if you don’t want to change that for each project separately, it might be easier for you to have two different workspaces – one for billable projects and the other for non-billable ones.

Time organization

• You can select the right wording to better suit your work. For example, you might don’t want to track time on the ‘Projects’ but on the ‘Location’. Such settings will reflect on the whole workspace, so if it makes sense for your business to have distinct tracking objects, having multiple workspaces is a better option for you.

Time duration formats

• You can choose how to display recorded time on your workspace, whether you want to show recorded hours, minutes, and seconds, or only hours. This comes in handy if different clients demand more details than other clients.

Data and currency format

• You can set up default types of data and currency formats. So, if you have clients from USA and Europe, your data formats displayed in reports might need to be different (e.g. 3,000 for USA clients, 3.000 for German clients, 3 000 for Swedish clients, or 3’000 for Swiss clients).

Company address and logo

• When billing your clients, your default company address and logo will be displayed on invoices and reports.

In case your company has multiple legal representative bodies, the billing process might need to be handled from multiple entities, and therefore from multiple workspaces.

Required fields

• If you choose that time entries cannot be saved without fields such as project, task, tag, or description, such settings will apply to all time entries within the workspace.

Custom fields

• If you create custom fields for time entries or users and want to make them required, that will apply to the whole workspace. So if you want to apply different custom fields to different teams and projects, having more than one workspace is a solution.

Alerts

• The rules you set for getting alerts will be unique to that workspace. For example, if you set up that a project manager should get the alert if a project reaches 50% of an estimate, that will apply to all projects.

And if you want to change that percentage for non-billable projects, for example, using multiple workspaces is a better solution for your team.

Approval period

• If for some reason, you apply different timesheet approval periods for different team divisions, you might need more than one workspace and adjust approval periods for weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly.

Does your team need only one workspace?

If your work processes are not too complex and the most important thing for you is to:

• Assign clear roles to team members
• Assign them proper projects 
• Track profit and generated costs

Then – having one workspace might be just enough for your team.

These are the settings that can be overridden however the workspace settings were initially set:

Project’s billability

• Project’s billability can be different from the default billability status set in the workspace settings if it’s later changed in the project settings individually.

Default currency

• You can set up a default workspace currency, but override that setting by setting up a different currency for a project/client (available soon).

Billable rates

• A default workspace billable rate can be set, but it can then be overridden by setting up a more specific billable hourly rate (Workspace rate → Member rate → Project rate → Task rate → Projects’ member rate).

This way you easily manage earnings for each team member, whatever their role in the team is.

Working days

• Default working days can be set in the workspace settings, but can also be overridden for specific team members if their working days are different.

Now let’s see how organizing workspaces in Clockify actually works.

How to actually organize a workspace in Clockify?

When you create a Clockify account, one workspace will be automatically created for you.

If that’s convenient for your team, you can proceed to create projects, assign tasks and track time on them.

However, if you choose to have more than one workspace, here’s how to create an additional one.

Next, you would want to invite team members to the workspace they belong to. 

If you have only one workspace, organizing team members in groups will be especially important for scheduling tasks.

You can also give different roles and permissions to team members, according to their responsibilities.

In Clockify, there are 3 levels of permissions:

• Admins: can see and edit everything
• Managers: can manage projects and approve timesheets
• Regular users: mostly track time

After all the people are included in the workspaces, proceed to create a base of your clients.

After you got the client base all set up, go and set up the projects your team is working on.

If you want to designate a project for certain team members only, you can do that in Project settings.

Now you can start assigning team members or groups to projects.

To avoid accidental double-billing, the billing status of the invoices can be tracked on the Invoices tab, where you can see which invoices were sent, paid, or overdue.

However you choose to organize your team, there is team-related or project-related information you want to keep in one place.

Clockify lets you create custom fields in a workspace, for time entries or for users.

The same goes for user custom fields.

All data within a workspace can be exported on the Reports page. You can filter tracked time for particular projects or clients. 

Choose the date range, filter out the information you want to display, and export data as PDF, Excel, or CSV.

Conclusion: Which option is better?

Operating within one or multiple workspaces has its advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the complexity of your processes, you can achieve the same results with either option.

In the first place, you need to ask yourself what your clients need from you. Can you segment data in the exact way they need if you have only one workspace, or would you need more?

Based on that, you can think about what could be the initial logical segmentation of your teams and processes.

Then, you should ask yourself: 

• what day-to-day processes look like for each team, 
• what outputs they need to produce, 
• how close each team cooperates with other teams, and
• if those outputs can be produced from one or multiple workspaces.

Following this chain of thought will give you the answer to the question of what is the optimal solution for successful project completion in your case.

See how to boost your current work processes with Clockify Tutorials.