Time Tracking & Planning

Runnit keeps planning (the time you expect work to take) separate from tracking (the time work actually took). Holding both lets you schedule capacity ahead of time and compare your estimates against reality for accurate budgets, billing, and reporting.

	Resource planning	Time tracking
Purpose	Allocating future work	Recording actual work
Created	During project planning	During or after the work
Precision	Hour and day blocks	Minute-level accuracy
Editable	Yes, until work starts	Draft and rejected entries can be edited, subject to time and accounting locks.
Used for	Capacity planning, scheduling	Billing, payroll, analytics

Turn time tracking on or off

Time tracking follows Finance by default. An administrator can switch it on independently in Settings > Tracking. When it is off, My time, Time approvals and actual-hour controls are hidden. Tasks still track progress and completion notes, and resource planning remains available. New time entries cannot be created until it is on. Existing records are retained.

Planning future work

Projects are broken down into tasks. You can capture a task with only a name, then add an estimate, assignee, and planned start when the work is ready to schedule. Only a scheduled task is allocated into calendar time slots and counts against a person’s availability. Backlog tasks remain visible in the project without creating capacity bookings.

While a project is in draft or Planning, its assignments reserve tentative capacity without appearing in My Tasks or personal calendars. Review them in Capacity or Gantt. Activation makes assigned tasks actionable and confirmed bookings eligible for calendar sync. Returning the project to draft hides its personal tasks and withdraws calendar entries after the next successful sync.

The scheduler only books working days. It skips weekends (unless a task allows weekend work), organisation closure dates, and any days the assignee has blocked out as unavailable, and it books less on days they have partially blocked. See Blocked-Out Dates for marking leave and appointments on a person’s schedule.

For example, a 10-hour wireframe task for one designer might be spread across three days, with four hours on the first, three on the second, and three on the third. It is not booked as a single block. Slots can be tentative, held, or confirmed, and carry a utilisation percentage so you can see how dedicated a person is to that work. Schedules on a draft project are tentative. Activating the project confirms them; moving the project back to draft makes them tentative again.

Tasks that span multiple days are captured as one calendar segment per day, so they render cleanly on calendars (and overdue segments can be highlighted) while the task itself stays the single source of truth for status and progress.

Tracking actual time

Time entries record the real work performed. Everyone logs time on My time in the sidebar (in the Me section). It shows one week at a time as a grid of the tasks and budget lines you worked on against the days of the week, with day totals along the bottom and Previous week, This week and Next week to move around.

You can capture time in three ways:

• Add time: choose a project, a task (or a budget line when the work has no task), the day, the hours and a note, and whether it is billable. The billable default comes from the budget line. The project, task and budget line lists are sorted alphabetically and filter as you type, so start typing a name, job number or task number to find it. Each project shows its job number and client underneath, so two projects with the same name are easy to tell apart.
• Start timer: the timer runs against the task or line; Stop timer writes the entry. Only one timer can run for you in the organisation. Starting from two tabs at once still creates one timer; stop it before starting another.
• Click a cell in the grid to add hours, edit or delete an entry.

Each entry carries the rate that applied at the time and says where it came from: entered by hand, recorded when a task was completed, or converted from a confirmed schedule booking when your organisation has that switched on (see Finance Setup).

Tip

Completing a task from the Tasks page asks you to confirm your actual hours and records a time entry for you automatically, so your planned-versus-actual figures stay accurate without running a timer. Confirming zero actual hours completes the task without recording a time entry.

If the hours cannot be logged, the task still completes and Runnit says so rather than letting you believe they were recorded: it names the hours and the reason. When the day is behind the timesheet lock and you hold “Edit locked time”, give a reason and choose Log the hours anyway. When the accounting period is closed, ask Finance to reopen it and add the hours from your timesheet.

People who can approve time also get an Everyone view: people against days for the week, with each person’s status, and a click through to that person’s week.

Locked and closed time

Two things can stop an entry from changing:

• Timesheet lock. Organisations can lock timesheets weekly or monthly after a grace period. Locked cells show a lock and the date they are locked before. People with the “Edit locked time” permission see Edit anyway and must give a reason, which is recorded against every entry they change.
• Closed period. Once Finance closes a month, entries dated in it cannot change until the period is reopened. A soft-closed month still accepts changes but asks for a reason and tells Finance: log, edit, delete or submit as usual, and when the month is soft closed Runnit asks why before saving, then does exactly what you asked with the reason attached.

Periods belong to a billing entity. Closing one entity’s September has no effect on work booked to another entity in the same month, so a cell is locked only when the period behind its own budget line is closed.

Submitting a week

Choose Submit week when the week is done. Runnit groups the week’s entries by budget and sends each group to the approvers that budget names. The result tells you what happened: Submitted and approved when a budget approves on submit, or how many budgets are waiting for approval.

If an entry is edited after submission, its approval is withdrawn and the week shows Resubmit week. Rejected entries show the reason in the cell; fix them and resubmit.

Approving time

Approvers work from Time approvals in the sidebar, or from the Time approvals group in the Approvals inbox.

• The queue shows Waiting on me by default, with All pending and Decided views, grouped By person or By project.
• A person’s week is one card with one section per budget. Each section lists its approvers and policy (first response decides or all must approve), and each entry’s day, task, line, hours, note and, when you can see prices, the rate and amount. It also shows the line’s burn after approval.
• Approve, Reject (with a reason the person sees), or Approve with edits after changing hours, the line, the note or the billable flag. Edits are logged as adjustments, so the original entry is kept.
• Approve all for this week and Approve selected clear a queue quickly.
• Where an approver has already proposed rejections or edits and everyone must approve, the next approver sees that proposal on the card. Approving as it stands keeps it. Changing a row replaces it, and anyone who already approved is asked to look again, because they approved something else.
• Unapprove returns approved time to draft with a reason, so the hours can be corrected and the week submitted again. Anything on hold stays on hold. Invoiced time cannot be unapproved, and unapproving time behind the timesheet lock needs the “Edit locked time” permission.

Who approves is set per budget in the budget’s Time approval block (inherit the organisation default, approve on submit, or require approval; any one approver or all; the budget owner, project owner, named people or a group). See Budgets.

Time entries move through this lifecycle:

draft → submitted → approved → invoiced
            ↓            ↓
         rejected     unapproved
            ↓            ↓
          draft        draft

Approved time counts as used on its budget line and lands in Uninvoiced work.

Comparing planned vs actual

Because planned slots and actual entries are stored side by side, you can compare estimated, planned, and actual hours per task or across a whole project. This feeds budget tracking and profitability reporting, so you can see where work is running over or under what you forecast.

Currency values at approval

Approval records billable and delivery cost values for the work date. Later rate corrections leave approved values in place. Unapproval returns time to draft; its next approval records new values. See Uninvoiced Work for transfer and repricing, and Finance Reports for how approved time contributes to reporting.

Time reserved by a self-billed draft or invoice cannot be unapproved or moved to another budget line until that document is discarded or voided. See Self-billing.