Glossary

Time Tracking Glossary

Clear definitions of workforce management and time tracking terms to help your team stay aligned.

Access Control

The system of permissions controlling who can view, edit, or manage resources. Defines what each role can do.

Activity

A single time entry representing work performed. Activities are the building blocks of timesheets and reports.

Administrator

A user with full organization control including settings, billing, members, and all projects.

Annual Leave

The paid holiday an employee is entitled to each year for rest, with a statutory minimum in most countries (at least four weeks under the EU directive).

Approval

The process of reviewing and accepting timesheets before payroll or billing. Ensures accuracy and compliance.

Assignment

The relationship between a team member and a project. Assignments control who can log time and at what rates.

Bank Holiday

Days when banks and financial institutions are closed. In the UK, this term is synonymous with public holidays.

Billable Hours

Work hours that can be charged to a client or project. Essential for professional services firms to track revenue.

Billable Leakage

Earned, chargeable work that never reaches an invoice, hidden in forgotten minutes, un-logged tasks, rounded-down time, and undecided discounts.

Billing Rate (Bill Rate)

The amount you charge a client per unit of work, usually per hour, appearing on the invoice before discounts; the counterpart to your internal cost rate.

Bossware

An informal, critical label for employee-monitoring software focused on control - screenshots, activity scores, and other digital surveillance. A near-synonym of tattleware.

Buddy Punching

When one employee clocks in or out on behalf of another who is absent or late, recording time that was not actually worked.

Collective Agreement

A negotiated contract between an employer and a union or worker representatives that sets pay, hours, overtime, rest, and leave for the workers it covers.

Core Hours

Fixed time periods when all team members must be available, allowing flexibility outside those hours.

Cost

The expense associated with employee work hours. Calculated by multiplying time by cost rates for profitability analysis.

Cost Rate

What an hour of work actually costs you - salary plus taxes, benefits, and overhead divided by working hours - the internal counterpart to the billing rate.

Custom Reports

User-defined reports with flexible groupings, metrics, and filters. Custom reports answer specific business questions.

Dashboard

The main screen in Sandtime.io showing weekly goal progress, recent activity, and a quick-start timer.

Double Time

A pay rate of twice the regular hourly rate, applied as a premium for certain hours such as work beyond a daily threshold or on a holiday, depending on law or contract.

Effective Rate

What you actually earn per hour once non-billable time is spread across your billable hours. It turns a headline rate into the real return on every hour worked.

Exempt vs Non-Exempt Employee

Under the US FLSA, non-exempt employees are entitled to minimum wage and overtime while exempt employees are not, based on duties and salary, not job title.

Federal Holiday

Holidays established by a national government, primarily affecting government offices and federally-regulated employers.

Free Plan

A pricing tier that gives access to a product at no cost. Sandtime.io is entirely free - unlimited users, no seat limits, no per-user fees.

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)

A unit that expresses a workload or headcount as the number of full-time positions it represents. One FTE equals one person working full-time; two half-time people also equal one FTE.

Goal

A time target in Sandtime.io for a day, week, or month. All goals are calculated automatically from the core hours setting - not entered as a number directly.

Gross Pay

Total earnings before any deductions such as income tax and social contributions; net pay is what remains after those deductions.

Hourly Rate

The monetary amount charged or paid per hour of work. Used to calculate revenue and cost from tracked time.

ISO Week (ISO 8601 Week)

A week under ISO 8601: it starts on Monday, and week 1 is the week containing the year’s first Thursday. Written as a week date such as 2026-W31.

Lock

Preventing further edits to a submitted timesheet. A locked timesheet cannot be changed without an approved unlock request.

Member

A team member who tracks time and views personal data. The standard role for employees and contractors.

Night Work

Work performed during a defined night window, often around 10pm to 6am, frequently carrying a separate pay allowance, tighter limits, or health checks.

Nonprofit / NGO

A non-governmental, non-profit organization that operates independently of government. NGOs and nonprofits use time tracking to report on grants, manage volunteers, and demonstrate accountability.

Observance

Notable dates that are not official days off. These do not affect work schedules unless an employer chooses to recognize them.

Open Innovation

A model where organizations build and share products openly with the wider community, often free of charge, rather than keeping everything proprietary.

Open Source

Software whose source code is published under a license that lets anyone read, modify, and redistribute it. Often self-hostable.

Organization

A top-level workspace in Sandtime.io that groups members, projects, and settings under one account. Each organization has its own billing and data.

Overtime

Hours worked beyond the standard workweek. Often subject to premium pay rates and labor law regulations.

Paid Time Off (PTO)

Paid leave an employee can take while still being paid, such as vacation, personal days, and often sick days, usually pooled into one bank of days.

Professional Services Automation (PSA)

Software that runs the delivery side of a services business end to end: projects, resourcing, time tracking, billable hours, invoicing, and financial reporting.

Project

A container for organizing time entries and tracking work. Projects enable billing, reporting, and team coordination.

Project Administrator

A user who manages a specific project including members, settings, and approvals. Limited to that project scope.

Project Visibility

Settings controlling who can see a project and its data. Determines access for non-assigned members.

PTO Accrual

How paid time off builds up over time - a set amount earned per period worked - instead of being granted all at once.

PTO Carryover

Unused paid time off that rolls from one period into the next instead of being lost, usually with a cap and a deadline to use it.

Public Holiday

Official days off recognized by a country's government. Most employees are entitled to paid leave.

Realization Rate

The share of billable work that is actually invoiced and paid. It compares hours or value billed against the billable hours or value recorded, revealing revenue lost to write-downs and discounts.

Reference Period

The window over which an average working-time limit is measured, so a busy week can be balanced by a lighter one within the average.

Rest Period

The minimum uninterrupted time off guaranteed between shifts and each week, such as 11 hours of daily rest and around 35 hours of weekly rest in the EU.

Revenue

Income generated from billable work. Calculated by multiplying billable hours by revenue rates.

Role

A set of permissions defining what a user can do. Roles include administrator, project administrator, and member.

Sick Leave

Time off taken because of illness or injury, usually paid and often protected by law, typically separate from vacation.

Tattleware

An informal, critical label for employee-monitoring software that captures screenshots, app usage, activity scores, or other digital surveillance data.

Temporal Rate

Rates that change over time with preserved history. Allows accurate retrospective reporting when rates are updated.

Time Clock

A tool employees use to clock in and out, recording attendance and shift start and end times, from apps and kiosks to GPS punches for field teams.

Time Off in Lieu (TOIL)

Paid time off given instead of extra pay for overtime or work on a day off, also called comp time.

Time Rounding

Adjusting recorded time to the nearest interval for cleaner billing or reporting. Common intervals are 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

A term for paid time that was not actually spent working, such as inflated hours, long unlogged breaks, or buddy punching. It is usually better addressed with trust and clear expectations than surveillance.

Time Tracking

The process of recording how employees spend their working hours. Enables payroll, billing, and productivity analysis.

Timer

The built-in stopwatch in Sandtime.io. Start it to begin tracking time, stop it to save the entry automatically to the current day in your timesheet.

Timesheet

A record of hours worked by an employee over a specific period. Used for payroll, billing, and compliance.

Undertime

Hours logged below the daily or weekly goal. Sandtime.io shows undertime as an unfilled progress bar - the gap between what you planned to work and what you tracked.

Utilization Rate

The percentage of available work hours spent on billable activities. A key metric for professional services profitability.

Week Number

The position of a week within the year, from 1 to 52 or 53. The count depends on the convention: ISO 8601 starts weeks on Monday, the North American style on Sunday.

Weekly Goal

The total number of hours Sandtime.io expects you to log in a given week, calculated automatically from your core hours setting.

Work-Time Registration in Poland

Work-time registration in Poland is the system or process used to record hours worked and produce working-time records.

Working Day (Business Day)

A day people are normally expected to work, typically Monday to Friday excluding weekends and public holidays; the unit behind deadlines, leave, and delivery estimates.

Working Time Opt-Out

A voluntary, written agreement in which a worker accepts that a maximum-hours limit does not apply to them, best known from the UK 48-hour weekly opt-out.

Working-Time Records in Poland

Working-time records are the ongoing logs of hours worked by each employee, distinct from the registration system or process that produces them.

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