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Time tracking without screenshots: what we record and what we never will
Exactly what Tengu stores when your team tracks time, who can see each part, and the things we will never record, with the tests that keep it that way.
6 min read
- time tracking
- trust
- remote teams
Remote agencies need two things from time tracking. The client needs hours they can trust. Payroll needs a number at the end of the period. Neither needs a screenshot of a developer's desktop every ten minutes, a percentage for how often their mouse moved, or a green dot that says whether they are at their desk.
We built Tengu's time tracking for the first two and left the rest out on purpose. This post lists exactly what Tengu records, who sees each part, and what we will never record. If something here is ever untrue, it is a bug and we want to hear about it.
The short version
Tengu records what the person tells it and what happens to the work, plus the two small traces below. It never records screens, keystrokes or whether someone is at their desk.
What Tengu records
Time entries
When someone starts and stops a timer, or adds time by hand, Tengu stores one entry with:
- when it started and when it stopped
- the quest it was on, or the project for time that isn't on a quest
- how it was made: the timer, a manual entry, or the end-of-day sweep
- an optional note from the person
- why it stopped: they stopped it, the sweep stopped it, a project budget paused it, another timer replaced it, or an admin stopped it
- a flag when a single timer ran past 10 hours, so it stands out on the timesheet
Edits
Manual entries and changes need a short reason. Each change is logged with who made it, what the entry was before, what it is after, and the reason. That log is the audit trail a client or an accountant can rely on.
Timesheets
For each person and week: whether it is open, submitted, approved or sent back for changes, when it was submitted, who reviewed it, and their note.
Days off
When someone asks for days off: the dates, an optional note for whoever approves them, and who approved or declined them.
The work itself
Status changes, comments, assignees, due dates, review decisions with their reasons, and, when a repo is linked, the PRs, previews and QA findings on each quest. This is the normal history of a ticket. It is the same thing ClickUp or GitHub would record.
The hunter and Usage
If your team has the hunter on: which 25-minute stretches you had a quest in progress while Tengu was open, for your own journal. Only you see it, and it is kept with your workspace.
For Admin › Usage, which owners, admins and Operations see: whether each person was assigned, finished or reviewed a quest or logged time this month, and the day they last did. It is kept with your workspace.
Who sees what
| Who | What they see |
|---|---|
| A member | Their own hours, their own rate, their own pay. Nobody else's. |
| Teammates and PMs | Quests, statuses and comments on the lists they share. Not anyone's hours. A project's PMs also see days off for the people on their projects; other teammates don't see anyone's. |
| Operations | Lists, members, settings, and everyone's days off, which they approve or decline. No dollars, rates, budgets, payroll or other people's timesheets. |
| People on a project with a budget | A warning at 75% and 90% that shows only the percentage. |
| Admins | Timesheets, approvals, pay rates, payroll, everyone's days off, and the Capacity Hub with each person's billable utilization. |
| Prizmstack staff | Billing: the plan, the seat count, the owner's name and email and the admins' names, and the names of people who left, for deletion requests. Nothing else inside your workspace unless you set it up with us or invite us. |
Today, the page where someone plans their day, shows them their own hours against a goal they set. Nobody else sees that goal or how close they came, or the list they plan with. A to-do they time on an activity is work, so its title shows on their timesheet like any timed work, where admins see it; a personal one never does. If they connect Google Calendar, the to-dos they place on their day go only to their own Tengu calendar there, under their titles, and a personal one goes only as "Personal".
What we will never record
- Screenshots. Not every ten minutes, not on a random sample, not "blurred".
- Activity levels. No keyboard or mouse counts, and no record of which apps or sites someone used.
- Idle detection. A timer runs until the person stops it. Forgot to stop it? The evening sweep asks and lets them set the real end time.
- Online or away status. Tengu shows what people are working on. It never shows whether they are at their desk. A day off someone asked for is a date, never an away status.
None of these is a setting an admin can turn on. They do not exist in the product, and we will not build them.
Hours never touch the game
Tengu has a game layer: finished quests earn XP and a small hunter in the corner levels up. Hours are kept out of it completely. Turn the hunter off for your whole team with one switch, or let each person hide it.
- XP comes only from finished work. An hour of overtime earns nothing.
- There are no points per hour and no comparisons of one person's time with another's.
- Meeting your own daily hours goal gives no XP.
That is what keeps the game from turning into a scoreboard for time.
How we keep these promises
Promises in a blog post are cheap, so a few of them live in the code:
- A test scans the board, the quest view and the character screens, and fails if words like "hours" or "compared to" appear there. Only a member's own timesheet and day plan may talk about hours. It is part of our test suite.
- The same test fails if any of those screens reads pay rates, billable rates, budgets or payroll.
- The progression code that awards XP never imports the time or finance code.
- Budget warnings carry a percentage only, never dollars or other people's hours.
Putting hours into the game would mean deleting those tests first.
What clients get instead
The objection we hear most: "My clients need proof of hours." Our answer is that a finished task is better proof than a screenshot.
For any client project, you can show:
- the quest, with the request in its description
- the time entries on that exact quest, with any edits and their reasons
- its status history, from started to in review to passed
- when your repo is linked, the PR, the preview and a QA run with screenshots of the feature working
- the approved weekly timesheet those hours belong to
That is evidence of the work. A desktop screenshot only proves someone was at a computer.
Where this doesn't fit
Some clients, often US companies paying remote contractors, write screenshots into the contract. If you have one of those, Tengu is not the tool for that engagement. Hubstaff and similar tools are built for proof-of-work screenshots. You can keep Hubstaff for the people on that contract and move everyone else.
Why we care
We run a remote agency ourselves, and a lot of our team are contractors. The people who do the best work are the ones you can least afford to lose, and they are the first to leave when they feel watched. We wanted a tool where the work gets seen and the people don't get watched.
