The Design Office
Time tracker — project hours
Hours by person, project and design stage — the missing half of practice profitability. Booked against the mandate, certified by someone other than the person who booked them, and closed by period.
- Partner
- Project architect
- Studio team
In a practice. Every practice knows which project felt heavy. Almost none can say how many hours went into which stage of it, or who carried them. Without that record the next fee is negotiated on recollection, and the additional-services claim that would have been obvious is never made.
What it records
Hours against project, stage and deliverable
A line is a person, a day, a number of hours in quarter-hour steps and a sentence saying what they went on — coded to a design stage, a discipline and, where it matters, a named deliverable on that project. A deliverable belonging to another project is refused rather than silently accepted.
Certified by someone else, then closed
Nobody certifies their own hours — not even an administrator. A certified week is closed by period, which freezes every entry in it. There is no unlock: a late line goes into the next open period carrying its own true date, where it reads as the late booking it is.
The evidence cannot be rewritten
Person, date and hours are immutable at the database grant, not merely in the interface. A wrong figure is withdrawn with a stated reason and re-booked; both rows survive, and every move lands in an append-only ledger beside the hash-chained audit trail.
Where the studio’s hours actually went
Hours by person, by project and by design stage, a Monday-to-Sunday grid per person, and utilisation against a working-day denominator the page states in full. Every figure opens the entries behind it.
What it produces
- Hours by person, project and design stage for any calendar window.
- A weekly person-by-day grid, with utilisation against a stated denominator.
- Hours consumed by consultant coordination and internal rework, as recorded — the raw material of an additional-services conversation.
- Days a person booked past 16 hours across projects, which no single project can see.