What is project time tracking?
Project time tracking ties every logged hour to a project, and usually to a phase or task within it: strategy, pre-production, shoot, edit, revisions, project management. Where general time tracking asks how someone spent their week, project time tracking asks how a project spent its budget. The two use the same timesheet. They answer different questions.
The result is the project's actual cost in hours, which can be set against what was estimated and what was sold. For time-and-materials work it is the basis of the invoice. For fixed-fee work it is the only way to know whether the fee was right.
Why it matters
Why project time tracking matters
Every agency has projects it believes are profitable and is wrong about. Usually it is the client who is lovely to work with and asks for one small thing every week, or the format the team has made so often that nobody budgets it carefully anymore. Project time tracking shows the truth: hours by phase against the estimate, which phases always overrun, which rounds of revisions were never priced.
It also makes the next estimate better. A bid built on the actual hours of the last five similar jobs is a bid you can defend, internally and to the client.
And it settles arguments before they start. When a client asks why a phase cost what it did, a log by phase is a short, factual answer. When the team feels a project is being over-serviced, the same log shows whether they are right. On a retainer, it shows whether the monthly fee still matches the monthly work.
In practice
How project time tracking works in practice
- 01
Set the project up with the same phases that appear in the estimate, so actual hours land in the same buckets as planned ones. Each person logs time daily, or at least weekly, against the project and phase. Producers and freelancers are included, because their time is part of the cost. External costs such as crew day rates and equipment are tracked in the budget alongside, so the project's full cost sits in one view.
- 02
The producer reviews the burn weekly: hours used against hours budgeted, by phase, with a forecast of what the remaining work needs. When a phase is running hot, that is the moment for a decision, whether a scope conversation with the client, a change of approach or an accepted overrun. At the end of the project the final numbers feed a short review and the next estimate.
Watch out
What people get wrong about project time tracking
Logging everything to one bucket. A single line called "general" tells you the total and nothing else; if the phases are not tracked, you cannot see that the overrun was all in revisions. The second mistake is reviewing only at the end, when the information can no longer change anything.
And leaving out the hours that are not making. Calls, status reports, internal reviews and file prep are real project time. A project that looks profitable without them often is not.
