Time Tracking for Agencies: Best Practices in 2025

The common failure modes:

The Friday dump: Everyone fills in their timesheets from memory, guessing at hours spent. Accuracy: terrible.

Over-engineering: 15-minute increments and 47 project codes. Result: people hate it and fudge the numbers.

No visibility into why: Tracking time without categories means you can't learn from the data.

Disconnected from outcomes: Time data sits in one system, project data in another. Insights: zero.

Punitive culture: Using time data to criticize rather than improve creates gaming and distrust.

The best agencies balance accuracy with autonomy:

Make it effortless: Timer-based tracking and mobile apps reduce friction. If it takes more than 30 seconds to log time, it's too hard.

Daily habits > weekly dumps: Encourage end-of-day logging when memory is fresh. A 2-minute daily habit beats a 30-minute Friday frustration.

Reasonable granularity: 30-minute or 1-hour increments work for most agencies. You're looking for patterns, not precision to the minute.

Explain the why: When people understand that time data helps price projects fairly (benefiting everyone), compliance improves.

Celebrate, don't punish: Use time data to identify training needs and process improvements, not to catch people slacking.

Time data is only valuable when connected to financial outcomes:

Cost allocation: Every hour has a cost based on salary + overhead. Your software should calculate this automatically.

Project burn rates: Compare actual time spent against budgeted time in real-time.

Effective rate analysis: What are you actually earning per hour on each client/project type?

Trend identification: Are certain project types consistently taking longer than quoted?

Team utilization: Understanding billable vs. non-billable time distribution.

Monton automatically connects time entries to project costs and budgets, giving you profitability visibility without manual calculation.

Monton's time tracking is designed around agency realities:

Simplicity first: Clean interface with timer and manual entry options. No unnecessary complexity.

Project context: Time is always logged against projects and tasks, making data meaningful.

Automatic insights: See how time translates to costs and affects project margins without extra work.

Flexible granularity: Configure time entry requirements that match your agency's needs.

Team-friendly: Designed to encourage compliance, not create adversarial relationships.

The goal isn't perfect data—it's good enough data that actually gets captured. Monton optimizes for realistic human behavior, not theoretical perfection.