Recording your time

Everyone who works at dxw is responsible for recording their time. We usually work with our clients on a time and materials basis, so it’s important we can accurately track and report how our time is spent.

We use Productive to schedule what we’re working on, which helps us to forecast our capacity over future weeks and months in a reliable way.

We track our time at the same level of granularity that we bill it - for almost everyone in the team, that’s half days or whole days.

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
• were off sick or on leave, make sure this is recorded on BreatheHR and it should be automatically copied across to Productive
• were away due to a regular day off, as part of your working pattern, leave the time blank or zero out what you were scheduled to work on

We’ve set up Productive so it understands individual team members’ working patterns. This means you don’t need to worry about entering your non-working days.

Our delivery leads and account managers lend a helping hand when delivery team members aren’t sure how to record their time – they’ve been doing this for a long while and have a well developed sense for it.

Billable roles #

It’s important that all of your time is logged either against client projects or dxw time.

For what we expect are the most common types of dxw time, there are a handful of categories in ‘dxw internal’ for folks in billable roles to log time against:

• account management and client admin
• internal time
• Information Security Management System (ISMS)
• research and development time

For line managers, record the time you spend in one-to-ones against ‘line management’. For anyone writing blog posts or attending events, record that time as ‘marketing’. If you’re working on internal tooling, like updating the designs of our internal document templates, please record that as ‘internal operations’.  Any recruitment for non-project specific roles can be recorded as ‘internal operations’. All of these can be found under ‘internal time’.

Non-billable roles #

When logging your time there are 3 types of work:

• client admin/account management (not on a client project)
• ISMS/ISO work
• research and development outside of project work

All other internal work can be recorded in dxw-internal time.

Last updated: 19 May 2025 (history)