Manual timers are the reason timesheets are wrong
Every time-tracking tool that depends on someone pressing “start” inherits the same problem: people forget. They forget at the beginning of a task, they forget after lunch, and they reconstruct the gaps from memory at the end of the week. The result is a timesheet that is roughly right and precisely useless — you cannot bill from it with confidence, and you certainly cannot spot a workload problem in it.
Quillclock removes the decision entirely. The desktop agent samples activity once a minute while the employee is working and reports it. There is no timer to start, no task to remember to switch, and no end-of-week reconstruction.
What “real hours” actually means here
Quillclock separates two quantities most tools blur together. Tracked time is the span the agent was running. Active time is the portion of that span with real keyboard or mouse input. Both are shown, always, because the gap between them is information — it is meetings, thinking, reading, and stepping away, and pretending it does not exist is how tracking tools lose people's trust.
Activity level is expressed as a percentage derived from input counts. It is never a judgement of quality, and the product does not pretend otherwise.
Counts, not content
The agent counts how many keys were pressed. It never records which keys. Quillclock is not a keylogger: it does not capture typed text, message contents, passwords, or file contents. That is a design constraint, not a setting that can be quietly switched on later.
This matters for adoption as much as for ethics. Teams accept measurement they can verify the limits of.
From tracked minutes to a payroll-ready report
Hours roll up into daily summaries, seven-day trends, and per-employee reports you can filter by date and export to CSV. Attach work to projects and tasks to see where a week actually went, and set pay rates per employee to turn tracked hours into earnings.
Employees get the same numbers in their own portal — the same hours, the same activity levels, the same screenshots if you enable them. See how it works for the full path from keystroke to dashboard.