timesheet
Time tracking fails at the moment of capture. A call runs forty minutes, the next thing starts immediately, and those forty minutes never reach the record. By Friday the timesheet is a reconstruction, built from calendar entries and memory, and everyone knows it. A browser extension is an attempt to close exactly that gap: put the timer one click from the tab where the work is already happening, so there is nothing to remember and no second app to open.
That is the honest case for the Clockify Chrome extension, and it is worth being precise about what it solves. Capture is one problem. Deciding what the captured hours mean, and keeping the list of projects consistent between the tracker and wherever the work is planned, are different problems, and the extension does not touch them. This is about where the line falls.
The extension is free to install from the Chrome Web Store and requires a Clockify account. After logging in through the extension popup, the timer is available from the toolbar on every tab. Clockify's own page for the extension states that more than 300,000 users have it.
There are three ways in, and the difference between them matters more than it sounds.
The first is the popup. Click the icon, type what the work is, start the timer. Project, task, tag and billable status can be added to the entry from the same panel. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U starts the timer without touching the mouse, which is the version people actually keep using.
The second is selected text. Highlight any text on a page, right click, and start a timer with that text as the description. In practice this means the description comes from the ticket title, the email subject line or the card name rather than from a typed summary, which makes descriptions consistent without any discipline being required.
The third is the button the extension injects into other web applications. Clockify's page lists Trello, Jira, Gmail, Google Calendar and GitHub as examples, and the pricing page counts more than eighty integrations of this kind, including Asana, ClickUp and Salesforce. The timer appears next to an item in the other tool, so the entry inherits its name from the item.
The third method is the one that changes behaviour, because it removes the step where someone has to name the work themselves. The first two still depend on a person deciding, mid task, to go and start something.
Four options in the extension's settings do most of the work of turning rough capture into something usable.
Reminders send a notification when no timer is running. Idle detection discards time spent away from the computer, so a timer left running over lunch does not quietly turn into a four hour entry. Automatic clock in and clock out start and stop the timer when the browser is opened and closed, which is a reasonable proxy for a working day in a browser based job and a poor one otherwise. A Pomodoro timer runs fixed work and break intervals.
Idle detection is the setting worth enabling first. Forgotten timers are the most common source of bad data in any timer based system, and they are worse than missing entries because they look plausible.
The extension captures. It does not manage. Clockify's documentation is clear that editing past entries, analysing time, managing projects, inviting people, reviewing timesheets and exporting reports all happen in the web version.
This is a reasonable design. It also means the extension is the thin end of a larger commitment. To be useful at all, the timer needs a project list to attach entries to, and that project list has to be created and maintained somewhere. For one freelancer with five clients, that is a five minute setup. For a team of eight running a changing set of projects, it is an ongoing job that somebody owns.
The failure mode is specific and predictable. Projects get created in the tracker when they are needed for an entry, with slightly different names from the boards they correspond to, and nobody deletes them when the work finishes. Six months later the dropdown has ninety entries, half of them duplicates of each other, and reports have to be cleaned by hand before they can be shown to anyone.
There is a second boundary that catches teams out, and it is about who is allowed to fix mistakes. An entry started from the wrong project, or a timer that ran for six hours because a tab stayed open, has to be corrected in the web app by someone with the rights to edit that person's timesheet. Logging time on someone else's behalf starts at Basic, and locking past timesheets so corrections stop after a cutoff starts at Standard. Neither is on the free plan. A team that plans to review hours before invoicing should assume from the start that the review step happens in a browser tab that is not the extension, by a person who has been given that role explicitly.
Clockify's free plan allows up to five users and unlimited time tracking. The timer, timesheet, calendar view, the apps including this extension, and the tracking integrations are all in it. Two limits are worth knowing before a team builds a process on the free tier: the user cap, and the fact that the range of data available in reports on the free plan is one month.
Paid plans are priced per seat, and Clockify counts a seat as every active or invited user listed on the Team page, including the owner, administrators, managers and members. Deactivated users do not occupy a seat. Prices as published on Clockify's pricing page:
| Plan | Per seat, billed annually | Per seat, billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 |
| Basic | $3.99 | $4.99 |
| Standard | $5.49 | $6.99 |
| Pro | $7.99 | $9.99 |
| Enterprise | $11.99 | $14.99 |
The features most teams actually upgrade for sit on Standard: time off, invoicing, timesheet approval, locking past timesheets, attendance and overtime reporting, targets and reminders, the manager role, per task rates, rounding and the QuickBooks integration. For a team of eight on Standard billed annually, that is roughly $44 a month for time tracking alone.
That number is the one to hold in mind, because it is the number that makes the next question worth asking.
A team that plans work on boards and tracks hours in a separate tracker maintains the same list of projects twice. Nothing prevents this from working. Plenty of teams run it for years. But it has three consequences that are easy to underestimate.
The lists drift. A board is renamed, a project is split in two, a client changes their trading name. The tracker keeps the old names because renaming there has no effect on anyone's day until report time.
Nobody can answer the combined question. How many hours went into the work that is still sitting in review is a question about hours and about board state at the same time. When those live in two systems, it is answered by exporting both and matching them in a spreadsheet, which means it gets answered once a quarter instead of once a week.
The person tracking has to translate. The card says one thing, the tracker dropdown says another, and the person starting a timer picks whichever is closest. This is where most category errors in time data come from, and no amount of extension configuration fixes it.
The injected timer buttons reduce this for the tools they support, because the entry takes its name from the item. That is the strongest argument for the extension over the desktop app: the integration is the point, not the convenience.
There are two coherent setups. The choice depends less on features than on who is going to maintain the project list.
| Separate tracker plus a planner | Planner with a timesheet inside it | |
|---|---|---|
| Where projects are defined | Twice, once in each tool | Once, on the boards |
| Depth of time features | Deep: rates, rounding, approvals, invoicing, attendance | Enough for hours, totals and invoicing basics |
| What breaks first | The two lists drift apart | Specialised payroll and rate rules are missing |
| Suits | Teams billing hours as the core of the business, and anyone needing payroll grade attendance data | Teams where hours support project delivery rather than defining it |
| Cost shape | Per seat for tracking, plus per seat for planning | One subscription, with the timesheet as an add-on |
A consultancy that bills in six minute increments and runs payroll from attendance data should use a dedicated tracker. The rate and rounding rules alone justify the second subscription and the second project list.
A team of six delivering projects, where hours matter for invoicing contractors and for knowing whether an estimate held, is in a different position. There, the value of hours comes almost entirely from being next to the work they belong to. A project management tool where the timesheet is an add-on to the boards charges for it as an option rather than as a second platform, and there is only one place a project name exists. The trade is real: the reporting will not match a dedicated tracker. The question is whether those reports were ever going to be read.
For teams already committed to a planner, the practical route is to check what time tracking exists there before adding a second subscription, and to check which integrations connect the two if both are staying.
Tooling decides how easy tracking is. Habits decide whether it survives.
Start the timer from the item, not from the popup, whenever the item exists in a tool the extension supports. Descriptions typed by hand diverge within a week and make reports unreadable.
Turn on idle detection and reminders on day one, for everyone, not as a personal choice. A team where half the people discard idle time and half do not has data that cannot be compared.
Keep the project list short enough to read without scrolling. A dropdown that needs searching is a dropdown where people pick the wrong thing. Archive finished projects on a schedule rather than when someone complains.
Decide what the hours are for before asking anyone to record them. Hours for invoicing need to be accurate to the project. Hours for estimating need to be accurate to the type of work. Hours for payroll need start and end times. These are three different tracking regimes, and asking for all three at once is how tracking gets abandoned.
Install the extension, turn on idle detection and reminders, and start every timer from the injected button inside whatever tool holds the work, so descriptions stop being typed from memory. Then count how many projects exist in the tracker that no longer exist on any board, because that number is the honest measure of how far the two lists have already drifted. If it is large, and the hours are mainly for invoicing and for checking estimates rather than for payroll, moving the timesheet next to the boards is the cheaper fix, and Pinateca is free for up to five people and ten boards before any add-on is involved.
The extension itself is free to install and requires a Clockify account. The free account allows up to five users and unlimited time tracking, but the data range available in reports on the free plan is one month. Paid plans start at $3.99 per seat per month billed annually.
Not for anything beyond capture. Starting, stopping and describing entries happen in the extension, while editing past entries, managing projects, inviting people, reviewing timesheets and running reports happen in the web version. The project list the timer attaches entries to has to be maintained there.
Clockify lists Trello, Jira, Gmail, Google Calendar and GitHub as examples, and its pricing page counts more than eighty tracking integrations, including Asana, ClickUp and Salesforce. The button starts a timer whose description comes from the item, which is the main reason to prefer the extension over the desktop app.
Enable idle detection, which discards time spent away from the computer, and enable reminders so a notification arrives when no timer is running. Automatic clock in and clock out, which starts and stops with the browser, helps in fully browser based work and misleads in work that happens outside the browser.
It is when hours are the product: billing in small increments, payroll grade attendance, per task rates and formal approvals all justify a dedicated tracker. When hours exist mainly to invoice contractors and to check whether estimates held, the cost of maintaining the project list in two systems usually outweighs the extra reporting depth.