Recording your time

You must log all of your time in Productive, including internal time. You should do this every day. You are responsible for making sure it is accurate and up to date.

We use time entries to determine what we should bill to our clients, forecast our capacity, making hiring decisions and more. When there are errors these can have very serious consequences for us.

How to be a good time tracker: #

• Track your time every day
  • Prefill your timesheet if you are working for a client where that’s needed
• Post in the #help-productive channel immediately if:
  • Your working pattern changes
  • You prefilled a time entry and now need to change it
  • You notice an error or abnormality in what Productive’s expecting of you
  • You have any uncertainty about anything at all
• Keep your non-working days up to date

How to log your time #

If you are scheduled on to a project on Productive, you will receive a daily Slack message reminding you to record your time. If you are more than a day behind you will be tagged in the #help-productive channel. If your timesheet is not complete for the week, then you’ll receive a reminder email on the following Monday morning.

In Productive, you can log your time by going to Time > My time. If the service you want to log against isn’t listed, try searching for it, or talk to your project lead.

In general you should track your time in half days or whole days. For situations where it makes sense to be more granular, there is also a calendar view where (if you connect your Google Calendar) you can click on a calendar event to turn it into logged time, and a timer in the top right of the screen to track your time as you do a task.

Logged time usually has to be approved by your project manager. Once approved it will show up against the project budget. Time approval is not about the project lead policing what work you have done, it’s just the step in the process that allows the project lead to record how much of that time is billable. We sometimes choose to not bill for our time (lack of budget, opportunity for shadowing, remedying our screw ups, etc.).

Time recording guidelines #

If you:

• worked the time that was scheduled, simply confirm this time
• worked on a named project (client or internal, including “dxw Support”), that differs from the schedule, record your time as that
• worked dxw time, record your time to the relevant dxw internal budget (see below)
• were on leave or off sick, make sure this is recorded on BreatheHR and it should be automatically copied across to Productive
• were on a regular non-working day off, make sure a leave booking exists in Productive for the correct day

Productive should know your working pattern (length of day and regular non-working days) already, but it is your responsibility to ensure these are correct and to flag any issues or changes.

Some clients require us to prefill our timesheet for the month, so please do this when asked.

Changing a non-working day

To change a non-working day, go to Resourcing -> Resource planner, then find yourself and you should be able to move the blue non-working day bookings. Please add a note about where you have moved it from e.g. ‘Moved from 17th July’.

Billable time #

All client work is billable unless you have specifically been told otherwise.

If you have a one-to-one with your manager, a team meeting, spend time writing a blog post or case study about the project you are on, or catching up with dxw internal news, this counts as billable time. Receiving line manager or peer support, catching up on any challenges you’re facing, and working through development opportunities are all things that are beneficial to our clients.

Non-billable time #

For what we expect are the most common types of dxw time, there are a handful of categories in the dxw internal time project for recording time against:

• Learning and development / training
• Line management - if you are a line manager meeting with people who report to you, this counts as dxw time. If you are the person being managed, this time is billable as you will be discussing project-related things.
• Specific clients/accounts
• Marketing - writing blog posts or attending events
• Operations - recruitment, working on internal tooling, like updating the designs of our internal document templates
• Networking
• Volunteering
• ISMS
• SMS
• R&D

For everything else please use ‘other time’.

Time on sales #

If you’re working on a bid:

• Anyone who is not on client work should log all of the time they spent on a bid against the ‘Sales’ service of that bid’s deal in Productive.
• Anyone who is on client work should only log time spent on a bid when it’s more than an hour per day.

If you’re doing non-bid related sales activity

• To capture sales activities that are not directly related to a specific bid (for example time spent by client principals), use the dxw internal time budget’s ‘Sales’ service.

Last updated: 13 August 2026