USE CASE
Project time tracking
You cannot tell where a project's hours went until it is already over budget. Continuous attribution turns that post-mortem into a trend line.
Discovering the overrun after it matters
Fixed-fee and retainer work fails quietly. Hours accumulate against a project faster than deliverables complete, and because nobody is comparing the two mid-flight, the shortfall surfaces at invoicing — when the only available responses are absorbing the cost or a difficult conversation with a client who thought the price was settled.
Scope creep works the same way. Each addition is small, none triggers a renegotiation, and the cumulative effect is a project that consumed 140% of its estimate for the fee agreed at 100%. The information needed to catch it existed all along; it just was not assembled until too late.
How burn becomes visible
- 01
Every session lands on its project
Attribution as work happens means the consumed-hours figure is current by construction rather than compiled at month-end.
- 02
Consumed hours sit against the budget
Set the estimate or retainer allocation, and burn is a comparison you can read at any point in the month instead of a number you compute afterwards.
- 03
A manager approves it
The closed session lands in a review queue with its full context — who, which project, how long, which day. Approving takes a click, and the decision is recorded against the session permanently.
- 04
Drift shows up as a trend
A project burning faster than its deliverables complete looks different from one tracking to plan — weeks before either produces an invoice.
What changes
- Burn-down per client and project readable mid-month, not after the fact.
- Scope creep surfaces while a change order is still a reasonable conversation.
- Retainer over-burn and under-burn both become visible — the second is what quietly loses renewals.
- Fixed-fee projects get a real-time margin view, since every consumed hour spends margin directly.
What this does not do
This is not project management. Workclave holds no tasks, dependencies or Gantt charts, and it will not tell you whether the work is on track in terms of scope delivered — only how much effort has been spent against what was allocated. Pair it with whatever board your team already runs; the hours side is what it does.
Project time tracking — common questions
Can we track budgets in hours and in money?
Sessions record hours against projects; combined with your rates, that gives the value view. Rate data stays restricted to finance and owners rather than being visible across the team.
Does this work for retainers as well as fixed-fee projects?
Yes. A retainer is an allocation of hours per period, so consumption against it is the same comparison — with the added benefit of catching under-burn, which is what makes clients feel overcharged before they leave.
What if one person works across many projects in a day?
That is the normal case and the reason sessions exist rather than daily clock-ins. Each block of work carries its own project, so per-project burn stays accurate no matter how fragmented the day is.
Comparing project time tracking tools?
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