Entries, codes, monthly cycles, and where logged hours end up.
Time tracking is the foundation the rest of Synthelio sits on. Utilization, cost, engagement margin, and every number in the P&L module are derived from logged hours. If the hours are wrong, everything downstream is wrong, and no amount of reporting fixes it.
This article covers the shape of the system. The mechanics of actually entering hours are in the logging time article.
One entry records a date, an engagement, a timesheet code, a number of hours, and an optional note.
The note is optional and worth writing anyway. Six weeks later, when an engagement is 60 percent through its budget and 40 percent through its scope, the difference between useful hours and a wall of numbers is whether anyone described what they were doing.
Codes are defined per engagement rather than globally, which is why you choose the engagement first and the code second. The same firm can have a detailed code set on one engagement and a simple one on another.
If the engagement is linked to a Jira project, its issues become the timesheet codes, so hours are attributed to real tickets rather than to a generic bucket.
Synthelio works on a monthly cycle. Your entries across the month form one timesheet, which moves through states: open while you are logging, submitted once you send it, and approved once your manager signs it off.
After a month is closed, entries in it can no longer be changed. That is deliberate, because a month that has been approved, invoiced, and reported on cannot keep moving underneath the numbers built from it. Corrections after close are a conversation with whoever runs your month-end, not a self-service edit.
Once logged, an hour does several jobs at once:
Note that non-billable hours on a client engagement still count as cost. That is intentional and it is the point. A system that only counts billable hours on both sides will overstate profitability on exactly the engagements that are going wrong, because troubled engagements are where non-billable hours pile up.
Approved time off is tracked separately from logged work but affects the same numbers, because a person on vacation has less available capacity that week. Requesting and approving leave has its own article.
The entry itself can come from several places, and they all produce the same record:
Time tracking is free for any number of people, with no expiry. That is not a trial tier.
The reasoning is worth stating, because it explains a design decision rather than just a price. A time tracking tool that charges per seat quietly pushes firms toward tracking fewer people, and a firm where half the team is outside the system has margin numbers that are fiction. Charging for the input that makes every other number trustworthy would be the wrong incentive.
Whether people log promptly.
A person logging daily is recording what they just did. The same person filling in a week on Friday afternoon is reconstructing it from memory, and reconstructions are rounded, tidy, and wrong in a specific direction: non-billable time disappears first, which is precisely the time that explains a failing engagement.
If a third of your team logs a week late, your margin is a week stale and optimistic. This is a habit problem rather than a software problem, and it is worth treating as one.
Tell us what you need. We will point you to the answer or write the article.
