Your invoice says forty hours. What does it point at?
A client asks what the hours actually were. Somewhere in the reply is a number somebody typed on a Friday afternoon — and nothing underneath it points at any particular piece of work.
Growth and up · the desktop tracker is free · attendance is on every plan, including the trial.- Which project?—
- Which task?—
- Which day?—
Nine hours, drawn to width.
Below are the sessions a tracked day produces, drawn to scale — an illustration, not a screen. Five tracked stretches, four paused gaps, and the gaps are cut out of the bar rather than tinted, because a hole is the honest rendering of nothing recorded.
- Build — onboarding flow09:00–10:451h 45m
- QA — checkout11:00–12:301h 30m
- Design — report screens13:20–15:101h 50m
- Build — report screens15:25–17:051h 40m
- Review — hand-off notes17:20–18:0040m
- Paused — nothing recorded1h 35m
The three questions from the top of this page
A session belongs to a project. It was chosen when the work started, not assigned to the hours afterwards.
And to a task inside that project. The tracker runs when the task runs, so the hours and the work they produced are the same record.
The session carries its own start and stop, and lines up against the same week as the work itself, in the same workspace.
Shiftena does not send the invoice. It gives you the thing the invoice refers to.
“Can you break these hours down?” is a fair question.
The forty at the top of this page is not a lie. It is a reconstruction — and a total is the one thing in the whole exchange that cannot be checked.
The person who typed it is not lying. They are reconstructing, four days late, from memory — and reconstruction is the only tool a timesheet ever gave them.
Hours attached to work, not to a week.
The desktop tracker records a work session against the task someone is actually on. That one decision is what makes the breakdown possible later.
- A session belongs to a project and a task — not to a day, and not to a row in a sheet.
- It starts and stops with the employee. The tracker runs when the task runs.
- The hours and the work they produced sit in the same system, so they line up against the same week.
- Nothing has to be remembered on Friday, because nothing was waiting to be typed.
Tasks can live on spreadsheet-style work boards, which are a Business-plan feature — worth knowing, since this page is about Growth.
Where an hour is docked
ILLUSTRATIONThe session sits physically inside the task, which sits inside the project. That is why the hours can be broken down at all — the breakdown is not reconstructed afterwards, it is how the hours were stored.
The gaps in that bar are not missing data. They are the feature.
The tracker runs when a task runs. Below is one session at three moments — an illustration, with no person, no client and no date.
Build — report screens. The session is being written while the work happens.
No session is produced here. Not a zero, not an estimate — nothing at all.
The duration freezes where it stopped. It does not keep counting, and it does not get filled in later.
Starting and stopping belongs to the employee, not to a manager and not to a schedule. A paused stretch produces no session, so there is nothing to bill and nothing to quietly round up — which is exactly why the tracked stretches are worth something. A bar with no holes in it would just be a differently shaped guess.
Screenshots and session recording are a separate Growth feature with their own page. Time tracking on its own records the session, not the screen.
Time tracking starts on Growth.
Said plainly, with the team size and storage each plan carries, because getting this wrong turns a marketing page into a support ticket.
If you are not on Growth yet, you are not without a record. The free 30-day trial and every plan include attendance, which records the day — one tap in, one tap out. Plans differ on team size, storage and the extras built on top. Work sessions against projects and tasks begin at Growth.
What sits next to it
Time tracking is one page of the same workspace. These are the others.
Time tracking, answered
Does it track anything while someone is paused?
No. Paused means paused — nothing is recorded while someone is off the clock. The gaps in a tracked day are real gaps, which is exactly why the tracked stretches are worth something. A tracker that quietly filled the holes would make the whole day a guess again.
Do people have to use the desktop app, or can they track in a browser?
Work sessions are what the desktop tracker is for — it runs alongside the task, and the app is free on Windows and macOS. Checking in and out for the day is different: attendance works from the web app in a browser or from the tracker, and it is on every plan including the trial.
What exactly does a session record?
The project and the task it belongs to, and when it started and stopped. That is the session — and nothing at all while it is paused.
Does this replace attendance, or sit on top of it?
It sits on top. Attendance records the day — one tap in, one tap out, on every plan. Time tracking records what the hours inside that day were spent on, against projects and tasks. Teams who only need to know who worked when do not need this feature at all.
Can a manager change a session after the fact?
What a manager can see or change anywhere in the workspace is set by roles and permissions rather than by convention. The point of the tracker, though, is that the session is written while the work is happening — a corrected number and a recorded one are never the same kind of evidence.
Which plans include it, and what does the trial give us?
Time tracking starts on Growth and is included on every plan above it. The free 30-day trial and every plan include attendance, leave and the holiday calendar in full. Plans differ on team size, storage and the extras built on top — the trial covers up to 5 people — never on whether your team can check in.
Next Friday, the hours are already written.
Nobody reconstructs the week, because the week recorded itself — task by task, session by session, with the gaps left exactly where they were.
Growth and up · free desktop app on Windows and macOS · nothing recorded while paused.