Project time tracking:
Hours where they belong

Why record project times?

Statutory working time tracking answers the question of how long someone worked. In turn, Project time tracking answers the question of what for. Only with this second piece of information does an hours account become a number you can calculate with. Three reasons why it pays off:

• Post-costing: You calculated a quote with 120 hours. Was it 110 or 160 in the end? Without Hours per project you don't know - and calculate the next quote by gut feeling again. The Post-costing is the only way to check your own hourly rates and time estimates.
• Time-and-materials billing: Anyone billing by the hour needs a record the customer can follow: which person, on which day, how long, on which job. A timesheet per project, which comes from time tracking rather than from memory, prevents arguments over the invoice.
• Budget in view: If hours are continuously assigned to the project, you can see in the middle of the project how much of the budget has been used - not only once payroll is done. That is the core of project controlling with hours: taking corrective action while it is still possible.

There is a fourth reason that is often underestimated: those who assign their own time to projects see for themselves where it drains away. The hour of odds and ends between two jobs suddenly shows up in the report instead of on nobody's invoice.

What makes good project time tracking

Many businesses have long been recording project times - in the evening, on paper or in an Excel spreadsheet. The problem is not the spreadsheet but the timing. Anyone reconstructing at 5 p.m. what they have done since 7 a.m. rounds to full hours, forgets the stop at the second customer and distributes the rest by feel. The numbers look tidy and are still wrong. Good Project time tracking can be recognized by four features:

• Choose when clocking in instead of estimating in the evening: The project is chosen at the moment the work begins - when clocking in. One tap on the phone, done. This makes the assignment part of the clock-in and not an extra task at the end of the day.
• Switching during the day: Hardly anyone works eight hours straight on the same project. Construction site A in the morning, field service at B in the afternoon, an hour in the workshop in between. Switching projects must be possible during the running shift without clocking out and back in - and it must create a clean time segment that ends at A and begins at B.
• Assignment afterwards: There will always be cases where someone forgets the project or chooses the wrong one. Then the correction has to be easy: open the day, give the segment the right project, off to approval. Without this path, wrong hours end up on the invoice.
• Evaluation per project and per person: In the end, what counts is how many hours are on the project and who worked them. You need both together for invoicing and post-costing - and both should be visible at a glance, not only after a pivot table.

Cost center, project, job: which is which?

The terms are often used interchangeably but mean different things:

• Cost center: A permanent place in the business where costs arise - the workshop, Site North, the administration department. Cost centers run for years. The Cost center accounting asks what each area costs per month; the Cost center time tracking supplies the staff hours for it.
• Project: An undertaking with a beginning, an end and usually a budget - the renovation at customer Meier, the website for the agency, the refurbishment of Building 3. Projects are created, run and are completed.
• Job: The individual customer job with a number, often part of a project or identical to it. In the trades, job and project are usually the same: job 2026-0417, customer Meier, bathroom renovation.

For time tracking, the difference is secondary. What matters is that you have a list to choose from when clocking in - whether you call them projects, cost centers or jobs. Anyone who needs both creates cost centers as permanent entries and projects as temporary ones.

Project time tracking in 4 steps

1. Create projects

Every project gets a number, a name, the customer and - if available - an hours budget. The number should be the same as in the quote or in accounting so that the report later matches the invoice without re-keying. Completed projects are closed so they no longer appear when clocking in; the list stays short.

2. Choose the project when clocking in

Whoever starts the shift taps the project next to the work location. This works on your own phone just as it does at the shared kiosk tablet in the workshop or at the site entrance: enter PIN, tap project, clocked in. Whether choosing a project is mandatory or optional is up to you - in trades with pure job work, making it mandatory makes sense, in an office with a lot of internal work less so.

3. Switch during the shift

When it is off to the next customer at noon, the project is switched. The previous segment ends, a new one begins - without clocking out, without creating a break. In the evening, the day consists of two or three clean segments, each with one project. Anyone who forgot something assigns the segment afterwards via time correction.

4. Evaluate

The Project times report shows the total per project and below it the hours per person, plus a bar showing how much of the budget has been used. For the invoice or post-costing, the whole thing goes out as Excel - per project, per period, with date and person. That is why Project time tracking as an Excel alternative is built exactly the other way round: Excel is the result, not the tool.

Examples from practice

Job time tracking in trades and construction: The crew clocks in on Construction Site North on their phones in the morning; at noon, two people switch to field service in Pasing. In the evening, the foreman sees the hours per site, and at the end of the month the office has the basis for time-and-materials billing and post-costing of the quote. Construction site time tracking here means: project and work location are often the same, and the hours overview per site goes to the client as documentation.

Customer projects in agencies and offices: Here the switch during the day counts. One hour for customer A, then a meeting for customer B, then internal administration. Anyone writing that into a timesheet in the evening loses half of it. With the switch during the shift, every hour stays where it was - and the budget per customer project shows in time when renegotiation is needed.

Sites as cost centers in services: Building cleaning, security services and facility services bill per site. Every site is a cost center, every clock-in carries it. Site management sees the hours of its site, executive management sees all of them - and if a site regularly exceeds the calculated effort, it stands out within the month, not only at the annual balance sheet.

Legal: what remains mandatory, what is added?

The Working time tracking has been mandatory since the Federal Labor Court ruling of September 2022 and the ECJ ruling of 2019: start, end and duration of daily working time must be recorded for all employees. Project assignment changes nothing about that - it supplements the mandatory recording with the information of what the time was used for. Both belong in one system: anyone who records working time in a legally compliant way and keeps project times alongside in a second spreadsheet has two sets of figures at the end of the month that never match.

For Privacy , purpose limitation applies: project times may be used for billing, costing and controlling, not for general performance monitoring. Anyone who records only what is necessary for these purposes - project, duration, person - stays on the safe side. In businesses with a works council, the introduction is subject to co-determination under § 87 (1) No. 6 BetrVG, like any technical time tracking. More on this in the article Time Tracking & GDPR.

How Presio helps with project time tracking

We built project assignment directly into the clock-in, not as a separate module alongside it. In concrete terms, that means:

• Projects under Organization: Create projects with number, customer and hours budget, close them, reopen them - in the same place as groups and work locations.
• Project button next to the work location: When clocking in, every employee selects the project next to the work location - in the app, in the browser or at the kiosk tablet with a PIN.
• Project switch during the shift: One tap ends the current segment and starts the next - no clocking out, no break. The day consists of clean time segments with one project each.
• Mandatory project optional: You decide whether clocking in without a project is allowed. On for pure job work, off for mixed teams.
• Time correction with project per segment: Wrong or forgotten project? In the time correction, each segment is assigned its project, and supervisors approve it like any other correction.
• “Project times” report: Hours per project and, below that, per person, with a budget bar showing how much has been used - and as an Excel export for invoicing and post-costing.

And because all of this is part of the same time tracking, working time account, payroll preparation and project hours always match. One clock-in, two answers: how long and what for.