Time tracking with required fields on stop gives you complete entries without making anyone fill in a form before work begins. The timer starts instantly, and the rules apply at the moment the record is written. The question that follows is practical: which fields should you actually require?
Require too little and reports fill with entries nobody can attribute. Require too much and people start padding fields with whatever gets past the check. This guide walks through each field, what requiring it buys you, and a few sensible setups for different kinds of workspace.
Why stop-time field enforcement works
The case for enforcing rules at STOP rather than START is covered in why we enforce required fields on timer STOP, not START. In short: at START, the person often does not yet know what to call the work. At STOP, they do. Asking at the end costs a few seconds and gets an accurate answer; asking at the start costs the first minutes of the task and gets a guess.
Stop-time field enforcement keeps frictionless time entry at the start and still guarantees that every saved entry carries what your reports need. The rule is the same whether time comes from a timer or is added by hand afterwards, so manual entries cannot become a back door around it.
A required field is a promise about your reports. Only require what you will actually group, filter or invoice by.
The four fields you can require
The usual candidates for a required field are description, project, task and tag. Each one answers a different reporting question.
Project
Project is the field almost every agency should require. Without it, an entry cannot be attributed to a client, cannot be billed and cannot count toward a project's budget. An entry without a project is effectively lost time in every report that matters.
Task
Task splits a project into parts: design, build, QA, account management. Require it if you report on where time goes inside a project, or if you quote work by phase. If your projects are small and you only ever report at project level, requiring a task adds a decision without adding information.
Description
A description is what makes an entry readable to a client or a reviewer: "Homepage hero revisions, round two" rather than a bare project name. Require it if your invoices or client reports list entries line by line. Expect some short descriptions; the point is that each entry says something.
Tag
Tags cut reports a second way, across projects: overtime, on site, rework. Requiring a tag on every entry is a strong rule and suits only workspaces where every entry genuinely belongs to one of a small, well-known set of tags. Otherwise people will pick the first tag in the list to get past STOP, and the tag data becomes noise.
| Field | Require it when | Skip it when |
|---|---|---|
| Project | Almost always | Rarely; only for purely personal tracking |
| Task | You report or quote by phase | Projects are small and reported as a whole |
| Description | Clients see line-by-line entries | Reports stay at project or task level |
| Tag | Every entry fits a small, known set of tags | Tags are occasional labels |
Three sensible setups
There is no single correct configuration. These three cover most agencies.
Client services workspace -> project + task + description
Internal operations -> project only
Field or on-site work -> project + task + tag (small, fixed tag list)Client services. Work is billed by the hour and clients see detailed timesheets. Require project, task and description. The few seconds at STOP pay for themselves the first time a client asks what an entry was for.
Internal operations. Time is tracked for capacity and cost, not invoices. Require project only, so people track consistently without overthinking it.
Field work. If every entry must say whether it was on site or remote, a required tag from a short list is reasonable. Keep the list short enough that the right choice is obvious.
How required fields improve timesheet accuracy
Required fields improve timesheet accuracy in two ways. The obvious one is completeness: no entry reaches a report without a project. The less obvious one is timing. Because the person fills in the gaps at STOP, while the work is fresh, the answers are better than those reconstructed on Friday afternoon.
Two things undo that benefit:
- Rules nobody can satisfy. Requiring a field that has no valid options blocks people from saving their time at all.
- Rules that do not explain themselves. If STOP refuses without saying why, people assume the tool is broken. A refusal should name exactly what is missing.
Rolling out a new rule
Changing what is required affects everyone in the workspace at once, so a short announcement helps. Say which field is now required, why, and what a good value looks like. Then look at the first week's entries in reports and check that the new field carries real information rather than placeholders. If you are introducing the tracker itself, how to roll out a new time tracker without team pushback covers the wider plan, and projects, tasks and tags covers the structure behind these fields.
How Tickr handles time tracking with required fields on stop
In Tickr, nothing is required to start a timer. Admins choose in Workspace settings, under What people must fill in, which of description, project, task and tag an entry must carry before it can be saved. That rule is what makes STOP refuse, and the tooltip names what is missing; fill it in and STOP works again. Manual entries are held to exactly the same rules, so ADD stays unavailable until the entry is complete.
A tag cannot be required while the workspace has no tags, because a rule nobody can satisfy would be a timer nobody can stop. Settings belong to each workspace, so a client services workspace and an internal one can have different rules. The docs describe each setting in full.
