Overview

Time tracking exists to answer one question: what can I bill?

Everything else follows from that. An entry is a date, a duration, a description, and something to attribute it to.

The two things that decide whether an hour is billable

An hour reaches an invoice only if both are true:

1. It is marked billable. Not-billable time is tracked and reported, never invoiced.
2. It is attributed to a client, through a project or a client directly.

An entry can be billable and still be uninvoiceable, because it has no client. Those entries have their own screen, Time without a client, so they stop disappearing.

A third condition applies at invoicing time rather than at tracking time: the hour needs a rate. Hours with no rate stay visible but cannot be priced.

Where the hours go

Tracked hours are pulled onto an invoice from the invoice editor, not pushed from here. See Adding tracked time to an invoice.

Once billed, an hour is allocated to that invoice and cannot land on a second one.

Whose time you see

By default your own. If you manage a team, you can switch to another person's timesheet, and the header says whose you are looking at.

The time tracker role exists for exactly this area: an external freelancer who should log hours and nothing else sees Time and Travel, and no other module.

Billing fields are for managers

Whether an entry is billable, and any rate override or discount on it, sit in a managers-only section of the entry form. A person tracking their own hours records what they did; what it is worth is somebody else's decision.

Exporting

Any period can be exported as a timesheet, filtered by organization, project or employee, with the columns you choose. See The week and month views.