A fair number of time tracking tools will take a screenshot of your team's monitors every few minutes, score their activity by counting keystrokes and mouse movement, and show you a dashboard of who looked busy.
We are not going to build any of it. Since that shows up as an empty column on our own comparison pages, it seems worth explaining rather than leaving it looking like something we have not got round to.
What the feature is actually for
The stated purpose is accuracy: proof that billed hours were worked. The real purpose, most of the time, is reassurance for somebody who does not trust the people they employ.
There are genuine cases for the first. Some contracts — particularly with government and large enterprise buyers — require auditable evidence of hours. Some staffing arrangements are paid by the tracked hour to people the buyer has never met. Field service work has real disputes about whether someone was on site. If that is your situation, monitoring tools exist, several of them are good, and we say so plainly on our comparison pages: Hubstaff does this well and we do not.
But that is not why most agencies buy it. Most agencies buy it because somebody suspects that some people are not working as hard as others, and this promises to settle it.
Why it does not settle it
Activity metrics measure input, and input is a poor proxy for value in creative and technical work. The most productive hour a senior developer has all week might involve almost no keystrokes — it is the hour they spent working out that the feature does not need to be built. A screenshot of that hour shows a stationary editor and a whiteboard photo. The activity score is near zero.
Meanwhile the metric is trivially gameable, and once people know they are scored on it they do game it, not out of dishonesty but out of self-defense. You end up paying for mouse-jiggling and measuring theatre.
The cost side is rarely counted
Surveillance is not free just because the subscription is cheap.
It communicates, unavoidably, that you do not trust the people you hired. That is not a matter of intent — you can introduce it with the kindest possible framing and it will still be read that way, because it is what it means. The people most likely to leave over it are the ones with options, which is not the group you were worried about.
And it changes what people record. Once monitoring is on, time tracking stops being a shared instrument for understanding the work and becomes evidence in a process where they are the subject. People start managing how they appear. The data gets worse at exactly the moment you have invested in taking it more seriously.
What we build instead
Our position is that time tracking should answer questions about work, not about people:
- What did this project cost, and did it make money?
- Is this retainer still viable at this price?
- Did we estimate that kind of job correctly?
- Is anyone at 95% utilization and about to burn out?
Every one of those is answerable from hours logged against clients and projects, with no screenshots and no activity scores. They are also the questions whose answers actually change what an agency does. A dashboard of who was typing at 2:40pm changes nothing, because there was never a decision waiting on it.
Where this leaves you
If your contracts require monitoring, buy a tool that does monitoring. We would rather tell you that than sell you something that does not fit — it is why every entry on our comparison pages names what that tool does better than us.
If what you actually want is to know whether the work is profitable and whether your team is over capacity, you do not need to watch anyone's screen. You need hours against projects, honest categories for the non-billable time, and someone to look at the numbers once a week.
That is a much smaller ask of everybody, and it answers the question you had.