Tracking Time and Expenses

Tracking time and expenses tells you how much time and money you’ve spent on a task or a project. For this you can use Stopwatch.

Start the Stopwatch from the task or from the project, clicking on the three dots and then choose Start the stopwatch.

Billable/Non-billable Status of Time and Expenses

To learn more about whether your project should be billable or non-billable and how to manage those settings visit this help page Billable/Non-billable Status of Time and Expenses.

Enabling Time and Expenses

You can enable Time and Expenses while creating a new Project,
Click Start a new Project,
Click Show more options,
Tick Time and expenses checkboxes to enable this.

Edit Time and Expense Settings

You can also enable this by default for all projects:

Open System Settings,
Click Edit Time and Expense Settings,
Set Track Time and Expenses to ON,
Set Time Estimates to ON to be able to set completion estimates on tasks,
Add Hourly Rates and Expense Categories,
Click Save Changes,
After saving the defaults, you’ll still be able to set different hourly rates by editing a specific project or client company:

Logging Time and Adding Expenses

You can log time in the project using the Add button on the right while in the project's Tasks tab, and choosing Add Time.

Pick out the task to add the time to,
Enter the time,
Add a description (optional),
Choose the user, job type, and check the billable checkbox.

You can also log time by opening the Time tab in a project:

Click +New Time Record,
Enter the time (eg. 1:40),
Enter a description (optional),
Choose a Job Type (Research),
Set a Date,
Select Billable if you plan to include this entry in an invoice,
Click Add Time Record.

You can add expenses to the project using the Add button on the right while in the project's Tasks tab, and choosing Add Expense.

Add the expense amount,
Add a description (optional),
Choose the user, category, date, task, and billable option,
Click Add Expense.

Or you can add an expense by opening the Expenses tab:

Click on +New Expense,
Enter the amount (eg. 100),
Enter a description (optional),
Choose a Category,
Set a Date,
Select Billable if you plan to include this entry in an invoice,
Click Add Expense.

To add time or expenses to a specific task, simply open it and click +Add Time or +Add Expense.

ActiveCollab Advice

You can also add time on the My Work page by going to My Time, + Log time.

Opening the Time or the Expenses tab of a project will list all the entries logged on that project as well as on individual tasks. You can also keep track of your logged time by opening My Work and scrolling down to My Time.

If you need to get this information from multiple projects, just run one of these reports (learn more):

Time Tracking shows how much time has been tracked across projects,
Expense Tracking lists fixed expenses across projects,
Estimated vs.Tracked Time helps you see how accurate your time estimates are,
Workload helps you distribute tasks evenly among your team.

Tracking Time and Expenses