Tickr user guide & knowledge base

The one rule to know before anything else

Time never crosses between workspaces. Every screen, every total and every report answers for the workspace you are in and nothing else. If a figure looks wrong, check the workspace name at the top left before you touch the filters.

Your role decides what you see

A role belongs to a workspace, not to you — the same person can be an Admin in one workspace and a Team member in another.

Where this guide says Admins only, Owners can do it too.

A word about the words

A workspace can rename the three levels: Client / Project / Task might read Customer / Job / Activity on your screens. This guide uses the default words. See Workspace settings → What you call things.

If somebody invited you

Open the link in the invitation email. Tickr asks you to choose a password, then puts you into the workspace you were invited to, as a Team member unless the invitation said otherwise.

• The link works once and expires. If it is stale, ask whoever invited you to resend it from the Team screen.
• If you already have an account, sign in first. If you are already in a workspace, the invitation waits on your tracker; if you are in none, Tickr shows it to you straight after signing in, to accept or decline.

If you are starting a company on Tickr

Use Create an account, then Create your organisation. You name the organisation, Tickr makes its first workspace, and you are its Owner. There is no confirmation email to wait for.

Forgotten your password? Forgot password emails a link that works once and lasts an hour.

The screen, in three parts

1. The left menu — every screen you can reach, grouped as Track, Analyse, Manage and (for Owners) Organisation. Anything your role cannot use is not listed at all. The arrow on its edge collapses it to icons, and it remembers your choice.
2. The top bar — the workspace switcher on the left, you on the right.
3. The screen itself — everything else.

The two controls at the top

The workspace switcher names the workspace you are in and lists the others you belong to, with your role in each. Switching reloads every screen for that workspace: its projects, its people, its time.

Your chip, top right, is also the app's status light. It carries your initials in a coloured circle, your name and your role — and while a timer runs:

• a ring sweeps around your initials, once per hour of elapsed time;
• the line under your name becomes the live clock instead of your role;
• if the timer is running in another workspace, it names that workspace.

Clicking the chip opens your profile.

The browser tab helps too. While your timer runs, the tab's icon carries a red dot and its title leads with the elapsed time — so a clock you forgot about is visible from any other tab.

Starting

1. Type what you are working on in What are you working on?
2. Click Project · Task and pick one.
3. Press START.

You can do these in any order, and you can start with the box empty — nothing is required to start a timer. The moment you most want a clock running is usually the moment before you have decided what to call the work. Tickr asks for the missing pieces when you stop, which is when the record is written.

With the cursor outside a field, Enter starts and stops the timer.

Picking the project and task

The picker groups projects by client and remembers what you use.

• Type to search. It matches projects and tasks, and expands what it matched. Enter takes the highlighted task.
• FAVOURITES sits at the top. The star on a row adds it. Starring a task also stars its project, so the shortcut is where you will look for it. Unstarring the task leaves the project starred.
• Create new project and Create new Task are inside the picker, if your role allows it — you never have to leave the tracker to add the thing you are about to track against.

The description box also suggests descriptions you have used before; picking one brings its project and task with it.

The two small controls

• The tag icon attaches tags to the entry — free labels such as overtime or on site that reports can group by.
• The currency mark switches the entry between billable (charged to the client) and internal (not charged). Lit means billable.

Both can be changed while the clock runs, and afterwards on the entry itself.

While it runs

The bar shows the clock and the button turns red and says STOP. Keep typing the description, change the project, add tags — it all saves as you go.

• Started at the wrong time? Click the clock to open Start time and correct it. Elapsed time recalculates from the new start.
• STOP dead, with a reason? Your workspace requires something this entry has not got — usually a description, a project or a task. The tooltip names what is missing; fill it in and STOP wakes up.
• Started by mistake? The ⋮ menu holds Discard Timer, which throws the timer away without saving it. There is no undo, so its tooltip names how much time you are about to lose.

Pressing STOP writes the entry into the list below and clears the bar for the next thing.

Manual mode, in the bar

The small switch at the right of the bar flips it between Timer mode and Manual mode. In manual mode the clock is replaced by a day, a From and a To, and START becomes ADD.

1. Pick the day (it defaults to today).
2. Type the times. Tickr reads a clock the way you write one: 9 is nine o'clock, 930 and 9:30 are half past nine, 9.30 works too, and if your clock is set to AM/PM you can say 9:30 AM.
3. Press ADD.

The duration between the two is shown as you type. An entry that ends before it starts is treated as running past midnight.

The entry dialog

Add time manually opens the full dialog, which is the same record with more room: description, project · task, tags, billable, the day and the two times. Use it when you are adding several things at once, or when you want everything on one screen before you save.

Manual entries are held to exactly the same rules as timed ones — if the workspace requires a project, ADD stays dead until there is one, and says so.

The ⋮ menu

• Edit — opens the entry dialog with everything on it.
• Duplicate — copies the entry to now. On a grouped row it says Duplicate all N.
• Split — divides the entry into equal parts; you say how many. An entry too short to divide says so instead.
• Delete — asks first, and cannot be undone.

Grouped rows

If Group time entries is on in your Preferences, entries that share a description, a project and a task collapse into one row with a count. The number opens the group; the entries inside behave exactly like ordinary rows.

Anything that needs one entry's own times — Edit, Split, the span — is refused on a collapsed row, because a group's span is only the outer edges of several entries. Open it and act on the entry itself.

Resume, while something is running

▶ on a row starts a new timer on the same description, project and task. If a timer is already running, resuming stops and saves it first.

Paging

Long lists page rather than scroll for ever. The pager under the list moves between pages and sets how many rows a page holds.

The list

Search, filter by status (Active / Archived / All), and sort by any column. Each row shows the project's colour, its client, its access, how many tasks it has and how much time it holds.

New project asks for a name, and lets you pick a client then or later.

Inside a project

Opening a project gives five tabs:

Access, in one line

A public project is available to everyone in the workspace. A private project is available to the people named on its Access tab — and to Admins, who see every project whether they are on it or not.

Archiving and deleting

Archiving takes a project out of use: it disappears from the picker and its open tasks are marked done, while everything tracked against it stays exactly where it is. Come back with Restore.

Deleting is only offered once a project is archived, and it is permanent.

Filters

Period, project, client, task, member, tags and billability. Filters are applied on Apply filter, not as you type — so a half-built filter never fetches. The button tells you when there is a change waiting to be applied.

Summary

One row per group, with its share of the total, how many entries it holds, its amount and its duration. Group by project, client, task, member, tag, billability or description; open a group to see the level below it.

Detailed

Every entry, one per line. Select rows with the checkboxes (or Select all) and act on the selection:

• Change project — opens the tracker's own picker.
• Change billable — marks the selection billable or internal.
• Delete entries — removes the tracked time for good, after a confirmation.

The count reported back is the server's, not the size of your selection: an entry that was already billable is not counted as changed.

Rounding and money

If the workspace rounds durations, reports show the rounded figures and say Rounded where they do. Amounts are the billable time multiplied by the rate — the person's own rate where they have one, the workspace's default where they do not. Internal time carries no amount.

Export

CSV, Excel and PDF export exactly what the filters describe. One export runs at a time; ask for a second and Tickr says the first is still going.

Members

One row per person: name, email, billable rate, role and group.

• Role — Team member or Admin (Admins only; the Owner is set on the Organisation screen).
• Change next to the rate sets what that person's billable time is worth. Leave it and the workspace default applies.
• Deactivate user takes somebody out of the workspace without deleting anything they tracked.

Groups

Groups are for cutting reports by team — Design, Delivery — rather than for permissions. Make a group, then put people in it.

Reminders

Invitations you have sent and not yet had accepted. Each can be resent (a fresh link and a fresh seven days) or revoked.

Inviting somebody is an email address plus the role they should have. They appear as a member once they accept.

Name

What this workspace is called, and the time zone every entry's day is worked out in.

How time and money read

• Duration format — 1:30:00, 1:30 or decimal 1.50.
• Number format — which thousands and decimal separators to use.
• Currency and Default billable rate — the rate anybody with no rate of their own is billed at.

What you call things

Rename the three levels — Client / Project / Task — and every screen, menu and report follows. Pick a preset or write your own three words.

What people must fill in

Which of description, project, task and tag an entry must carry before it can be saved. This is what makes STOP or ADD refuse, and it names what is missing when it does.

A tag cannot be required while the workspace has no tags — a rule nobody can satisfy would be a timer nobody can stop.

Which days count as work

The working week. It decides "days with time" on the dashboard, and time tracked on a non-working day is reported rather than silently counted in.

Who can create what

Which roles may add projects, tasks and clients, and whether people can mark favourites. Tracking time is not affected by any of these — everybody does that.

My profile

Your name and email, and Change your password (current, new, confirm — leave all three empty to save the rest of the page without touching it).

Preferences

These are per person, not per workspace: changing your clock format changes nothing for anybody else.

Keyboard

A control is greyed out — why?

Tickr disables a control and says why rather than letting you press it and refusing afterwards. Hover it and the reason is on the tooltip. The usual ones:

• STOP / ADD — the workspace requires a field this entry has not got.
• A row's actions while a timer runs — resuming would start a second timer over the one you are tracking.
• Edit / Split / the span on a grouped row — open the group and act on the entry.
• Delete on a project or client — archive it first.

Common questions