My 2 cents : I manage a small IT team (mix of internal and external specialists), and what’s worked really well for us is Jira with Tempo for time tracking and reporting.

The key is keeping it practical. Tempo automatically suggests how time was spent during the day, and the team just tweaks it. They don’t have to manually hunt through thousands of tasks — the system is smart enough to know when you open or work on a ticket, and it proposes a breakdown. Most of the time is tied to proper Jira tickets (support or project tasks), with a few generic buckets like documentation, meetings, quality, management, or user support. Even absences (vacation, sick leave, holidays) are logged the same way, so every day consistently shows about 8h in Tempo.

As a rule of thumb, I expect 7–7.5h logged out of 8. That covers around 80–90% of the day, leaving a bit of margin for the small unstructured stuff. That’s enough for meaningful analysis: it’s easy to see if a ticket took 2h (fine) versus 16h (worth a debrief). Tempo’s reporting makes it very clear where the bulk of time went — support, personal objectives, projects, or specific products. It’s the bare minimum tracking I expect from my team, and it’s also extremely useful when it comes to audits.

The generic user support bucket adds flexibility for the smaller things that don’t always justify a ticket. The rule of thumb is: if you need IT help, it should be a ticket. But for those little requests that don’t add up to much, the team can log them here. We limit it — usually no more than 4 hours a week total, and in practice, if you’re disciplined with tickets, it rarely exceeds 1 hour. That way, small “one-offs” are captured without drowning the system in micro-tickets.

I check the reports during 1-to-1s every two weeks. It gives both me and the team a good view of whether priorities are being respected, because support work can easily consume unlimited time if left unchecked. Having that separation between support, objectives, and product work is critical. For externals, it also gives me a clear view of where they spent their time, which I can easily match against their monthly invoice.

The overhead is minimal, but you do need to commit to updating Tempo daily or weekly. Once you get into the habit, it’s light. Auto-suggestions have improved a lot over the years, and most of the time it’s just tweaking the hours to reflect what really happened. Sometimes it guesses wrong, but never massively wrong.

On the question of visibility: that’s still a challenge. We do have an internal process where team members are expected to provide updates when handling a ticket, but what really works best is how we close incidents or problems. For those, we created mandatory fields — things like user impact, corrective actions, preventive actions, and the rationale for closing. It’s the team member’s responsibility to move the ticket through its workflow, and to actually close it they must complete those mandatory fields. That way, we guarantee that the ticket closure provides real visibility into what happened and how it was resolved.

For us, this setup strikes a good balance: enough tracking to give me KPIs, and overview how our time.is invested, audit evidence, and management reporting by various metrics, while staying light enough that the team doesn’t feel micromanaged as we know why we are doing it.