How to track time for remote employees

The simplest option: someone logs their own hours, daily or weekly, in a spreadsheet or a basic timesheet tool. It requires no software investment and no monitoring of any kind, which some teams genuinely prefer on trust and simplicity grounds. The real cost is accuracy and effort: hours get estimated after the fact rather than recorded as they happen, entries get forgotten or batched at the end of a week, and there's no way to verify a number beyond asking.

Tools like Hubstaff track time via periodic screenshots and an activity percentage derived from mouse/keyboard input, sometimes with app and URL tracking on top. This solves the verification problem manual timesheets have, there's a record beyond someone's word, but it comes with a real cost: it requires disclosure and often consent depending on jurisdiction, can register focused, low-input work like reading or a client call as "idle," and reads as surveillance to employees who resent screen-level monitoring even when it's disclosed.

The third option, and the one most "how to track time" advice skips: tie the timer to something the person was already doing, not a separate action. Wrkbase's approach is a task moving to "In Progress" starting the clock, and moving off it, for any reason, stopping it, no separate start/stop button, no screenshots, no activity percentage. It solves manual timesheets' accuracy problem, the timestamp is a real event, not a memory, without activity monitoring's surveillance trade-off, because nothing beyond the status change itself is ever recorded.

If the team is small, high-trust, and time tracking is mostly for the employee's own reference, manual timesheets are a legitimate, low-cost choice. If activity-level proof of work is a real requirement, hourly contractors, client-billed work needing verification, activity monitoring is the honest tool for that job, not a workaround. If the goal is accurate hours without either the effort of manual logging or the surveillance trade-off of screenshots, status-driven tracking is built specifically for that middle ground, free to try with a real team up to 5 people, no card required.

This varies by jurisdiction and by which of the three options above is in use, manual and status-driven tracking record far less than activity monitoring does, which changes what disclosure is actually required. This isn't legal advice, check your own jurisdiction's employment and privacy rules before rolling out any time-tracking method, especially one involving screenshots or activity percentages.