How to enter hours, correct them, and avoid double counting.
A time entry needs four things: a date, an engagement, a timesheet code, and a number of hours. A note is optional.
Timesheet codes are defined per engagement, so the engagement determines which codes are available. Pick it first and the code list will be the right one.
Codes are referred to by their label, things like Meetings or Project Management, rather than by an identifier. If you are not sure which codes an engagement has, look them up on the engagement rather than guessing, because a plausible-sounding code that does not exist there will not be accepted.
The note field is optional and it is the difference between hours you can act on and hours you can only count.
Compare two entries. Six hours against Development tells you a day was spent. Six hours against Development with a note reading rebuilding import after client changed the file format tells you why the budget moved and gives you something to take to the client. The second takes ten seconds longer to write.
Time spent on a client engagement that you will not invoice is still time the engagement cost you. Rework, unbilled revisions, extra meetings, quick favors.
Leaving it out does not make the engagement more profitable, it makes the engagement look more profitable, which is worse. The ratio of non-billable to billable hours is one of the clearest early signals that an engagement is in trouble, and it only works if the non-billable side is honest.
Synthelio does not reliably block a second entry for the same date, engagement, and code. Two entries will simply coexist, and the hours will be double counted in cost and margin until someone notices.
This matters most in two situations. If your engagement is linked to Jira, your hours are already flowing in from there, so entering them again in Synthelio creates duplicates. And if you are catching up on several days at once, it is easy to re-enter a day you already did.
Look at what is already on the date before adding to it.
You can update or delete your own entries while the month is still open. Change the hours, fix the note, remove an entry added in error.
Two limits apply. You can only touch your own entries, since time entry writes are always self-writes, and nothing can be changed in a month that has been closed. Corrections after close go through whoever runs your month-end.
If your engagement is linked to a Jira project, log against the ticket in Jira and it flows through. Do not do both.
If you have connected an AI assistant through the MCP connector, you can log conversationally, for example asking it to record 90 minutes on an engagement under a specific code with a note. It runs as you, so the same rules apply.
A few checks happen on write, and each rejection has a specific cause:
This is the whole discipline in one line. Logging at the end of each day takes about a minute and produces accurate data. Logging on Friday for the week takes longer, feels worse, and produces a tidy reconstruction that is wrong in a predictable direction.
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