Hours per client and project, taken from the work itself.
A studio that bills by the hour or by the sprint needs to know where the hours went, and developers dislike timers more than almost anyone. Daytide reads the repository, the ticket and the branch from window titles, and builds the record without interrupting anybody.
Where the time goes missing.
How software studios usually bill: hourly, per sprint, or fixed price.
- Estimates never meet actuals
- A feature was estimated at five days. Nobody knows what it took, because the time was logged against the sprint and not the feature, if it was logged at all.
- Review and support work disappears
- Code review for another project, a production question from a client you finished with last year, an hour helping a colleague. Real time, rarely recorded.
- Timers break concentration
- Stopping to switch a timer is exactly the interruption developers try to avoid, so they batch it at the end of the week and guess.
A day, as Daytide records it.
This is what one person sees for their own day. Pick an entry to see what the label was based on.
- 09:10 to 09:30Stand-upTeam call20 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the project folder
- VS Code, 2 h 05: folder “harbour-booking”
- Terminal, 20 min, in the same folder
- Linear, 15 min: tickets with the key HDG
- You confirmed the folder on Monday
- 12:10 to 13:00AwayScreen locked, not counted50 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the page address
- GitHub, 50 min: pull requests in the repository “mill-lane-app”
Review is the kind of work. Mill Lane School is the client. The two are counted separately.
Why here
Not sorted. Daytide asks instead of guessing.
- Browser, 25 min: documentation sites and a search engine
- Nothing ties this reading to one project
If nobody answers within three days the question expires and the time stays unsorted. That is allowed.
- 14:15 to 16:30Harbour Dental GroupBooking portal, coding2 h 15
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the project folder
- VS Code, 35 min: folder “kessler-orders”
- A log viewer in the browser, 15 min, on the same project
- Working time
- 7 h 20
- Sorted without asking
- 6 h 55
- Private
- 0 min
- Questions waiting
- 1
Tools the template already knows.
Anything not listed here is learned in calibration week. Daytide sees an unfamiliar tool, asks what it is for, and remembers.
- Editors and terminal
- VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, terminal
- Code hosting
- GitHub, GitLab
- Tickets
- Jira, Linear
- Design handover
- Figma
The editor's window title carries the project folder, and a pull request or ticket page carries the repository or project key in its address. That is what Daytide matches on. Tokens and keys in addresses are stripped on the developer's own machine before anything is sent.
What the first week shows.
Hours per client and project
Team-level totals for the week, from editors, tickets and calls together.
Building against everything else
Coding, review, meetings, support and e-mail as separate kinds of work. Most studios are surprised by the size of “everything else”.
Old projects that still take time
Hours on clients with no active contract, which is either goodwill or an unbilled support agreement.
- Daytide: Yesterday two hours went into an editor window on a folder called “portal-api”. Which client is that?
- Harbour Dental Group
- Mill Lane School
- Internal
- Something else
What it will not tell you.
Developers are right to be careful about anything that watches their machine. Daytide does not read code, does not log typing and takes no screenshots. Each developer sees their own record and the reason for every label. If your team already tracks time happily with a free tool, the time record is not the reason to switch. The owner's picture and the Opportunities list might be.
Give it one normal week.
Install it, answer a handful of questions, and look at the picture on day seven. The trial runs for 30 days, so you see three more weeks after that before you decide anything.
No card needed to start. Want someone to set it up with you? Assisted onboarding is $250, credited to your first annual invoice.