How to Set Up Automatic Time Tracking for a Distributed Team (2026)

Team time tracking setup is the admin work of deciding, per person, when tracking runs, who can see the results, and how their hours get labeled. Get those three right at the start and the team never has to think about time tracking again.

Most rollouts fail in the first week, not the first month. Someone installs the app, tracking starts at 9am Pacific for a designer in Berlin, entries come back tagged with the wrong client, and by Friday half the team has turned it off. The tool was fine. The setup was not.

Rize now puts every one of those settings in one editor. The member settings release brings profile details, team assignments, permissions, agent preferences, and tracking schedules into four tabs on the Members page. This guide covers the order to work through them, and what each decision costs you if you skip it.

What does setting up team time tracking actually require?

Setting up team time tracking requires four decisions per person: which teams they belong to, when their tracking day runs, what they and their managers can see, and how their hours should be labeled.

Every tool asks for the first one. Few ask for the other three, which is why rollouts drift. A workspace-level schedule fits the person who configured it. A workspace-level permission model gives a junior designer the same view as the finance lead. A workspace-level AI instruction set produces entries that read correctly for engineering and nonsense for design.

The four tabs in the Rize member editor map to those four decisions:

Step 1: Build the roster before you configure anything

Get every person into the right team with the right role before touching schedules or AI settings, because team membership determines which admins can configure them later.

On the Members page you can search by name, email, or title and filter the roster by team, role, or status. Active members have separate Edit member and View profile actions, so reviewing someone's work and changing their configuration are different clicks. Workspace admins can reactivate deactivated members straight from the list, which matters more than it sounds: contractors who come back for a second engagement keep their history instead of starting over.

Set billing defaults in this pass too. Whether new entries on a team start as billable is a per-team decision, and it is the difference between a delivery team whose hours default to client work and an internal ops team whose hours do not. Bill and cost rates belong here as well, since project profitability is only as accurate as the cost rate behind it.

Team assignment is the unit that governs everything else in Rize: it decides which admins can edit a member, which rates apply to their hours, and which resourcing views they appear in.

Step 2: Set each member's time zone and tracking hours

Set the tracking schedule in the member's own time zone, not the admin's. A shared 9am to 6pm window applied across three time zones stops recording for half the team before their afternoon ends.

The Tracking tab holds the member's time zone plus a separate on/off switch and time window for each weekday, and shows whether tracking is currently enabled or paused. Time zones are not a cosmetic setting. The IANA Time Zone Database that operating systems rely on is amended several times a year as governments change offsets and daylight saving rules, which is exactly why a schedule stored as a raw offset drifts and a schedule stored against a named zone does not.

Two patterns to configure deliberately:

• Overlap teams. A Berlin engineer working with a San Francisco product lead has roughly three hours of overlap. Set the tracking window to the engineer's real day so the morning work before the overlap is captured rather than discarded.
• Part-time and fractional staff. A fractional CFO who works Tuesday and Thursday should have Monday switched off entirely rather than left on a default window. A narrower schedule produces cleaner data than a wide one you filter afterwards.
• People with no fixed hours. Turning every day off means unrestricted tracking rather than no tracking. That is the right setting for a founder or a contractor whose day has no shape.

One thing to check before you rely on this: the hours you set apply only when automatic scheduling is enabled in that member's own account, and the tab tells you when it is not.

Step 3: Decide who can see and edit what

Grant permissions per team rather than across the workspace. Most people need edit access to one team's hours, and almost nobody needs finance access to all of them.

The Permissions tab separates the two. Workspace access covers the Admin or Member role and finance access across the whole workspace. Team resourcing grants are narrower: they control capacity planning and the ability to edit other members' time on a specific team, and team admins manage those grants for the teams they run.

The practical mapping for a services team:

1. Finance lead: workspace finance access, no editing rights on individual entries.
2. Team admin or delivery lead: resourcing grants on their own team, including editing time entries when someone is out.
3. Individual contributor: their own entries only.
4. Workspace admin: roster changes, rates, and role assignment. Usually one or two people.

Editing rights are the one to be careful with. Someone correcting a teammate's entries is fixing a client invoice, so the grant should follow delivery ownership rather than seniority.

Step 4: Give the AI per-person instructions

Per-person AI instructions are what make generated time entries read like the person wrote them. A designer's entries should name Figma files and client shorthand; an engineer's should name repositories and tickets.

The Agent tab is configurable per member by workspace admins and by admins of that member's active team. It has four sections:

• Time entry preferences: the language, typical entry size, and minimum entry duration for generated entries. A lawyer billing in six-minute increments and a designer working in two-hour blocks want different floors here.
• Guidance: context for the member's chats, reports, routines, and tagging, such as which clients they work with and how they describe their work.
• Tagging instructions: the rules the AI prioritizes when assigning tags to that person's entries.
• Activity summaries: how Rize should write entry titles and descriptions.

Use Skills to reuse instructions you would otherwise paste into ten member records, or Expand to open a larger editor when the guidance runs long. The automatic capture is identical for everyone. The instructions are what turn the same raw activity into an entry a specific client will recognize on an invoice.

Per-member agent context is a set of written instructions attached to one person's account that tells Rize how to name, size, and tag the entries generated from their work.

What stays under the member's control

The schedule an admin sets is a starting point, not a lock. Members reach the same automatic tracking schedule from their own settings and can override it at any time.

On the member's side it lives under Settings, then Activity, then Automatic Tracking Schedule. They see the same per-weekday rows an admin sees, they can override the schedule manually on any given day, and disabling every weekday makes Rize track around the clock rather than not at all.

Say this out loud during rollout. A tracking window that an admin can set and a member cannot see reads as monitoring, and teams work around monitoring. A window both sides can adjust reads as a default, which is what it is. That difference is the whole distinction between time tracking and surveillance software, and it decides whether the tool survives month two.

It also changes what the paused state means. Someone who turned tracking off is not evading anything, since they had the switch all along. They are telling you the schedule is wrong, or that the permissions make them uncomfortable, and both are worth asking about before you re-enable anything.

Why the setup work pays back

The setup is worth an hour because the alternative is asking people to reconstruct their week from memory, which they are reliably bad at.

According to a 2014 Harvard Business Review analysis of timesheet behavior, unrecorded work costs the U.S. economy $7.4 billion a day. Research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes roughly 23 minutes to return to a task after an interruption, which is the same fragmentation that makes end-of-week reconstruction guesswork. A separate Harvard Business Review study on application toggling documented how often people switch tools in a single day.

Momentum Studio, a 12-person creative agency, recovered 20% more billable time and cut 8 hours a week of admin after switching from manual tracking, and saw project profitability rise 15%. Their CEO Ben Jackson put the problem plainly: "I'm a trusting leader, but I don't even trust myself to remember what I worked on two days ago. So how can I expect my designers to?" Impulse Lab, a 6-person product studio, reports 98% billing accuracy and client reporting that runs 5x faster.

What to change when someone moves, switches teams, or leaves

Three roster events need a member edit: a time zone change, a team reassignment, and a departure. Each one silently corrupts reporting if the record is left as it was.

A move is the one people forget. Someone relocates from Chicago to Lisbon, nobody updates the Tracking tab, and their entries keep landing six hours off. Utilization for that person reads low, and the weekly hours land on the wrong day at the boundary of the week. Update the time zone and the daily start and end times together, since the second is meaningless without the first.

A team reassignment moves more than a label. Team assignment carries the billable default, the bill and cost rates, and which admins can configure that person, so a designer moving from an internal team to a client team needs their rates checked in the same pass. If they split time across two teams, set the default team so new entries land somewhere predictable.

A departure is a deactivation, not a deletion. Deactivated members keep their history, which is what makes past project margins reproducible six months later. Workspace admins can reactivate them from the Members list when a contractor comes back, and invited or rejected members no longer show edit or profile actions at all, so the list stays limited to people you can actually configure.

What does a two-week rollout look like?

Two weeks is enough: one hour of admin setup, one week of tracking with no billing pressure, then one review pass that tunes the AI instructions before anyone invoices from the data.

1. Day 1, admin setup. Roster, team assignments, and rates first. Then tracking hours and time zones per person. Then permissions. Budget five minutes per member.
2. Day 1, agent instructions. Write guidance for one person per role, not all ten. A designer, an engineer, and an account manager cover most of the variation on a services team.
3. Days 2 to 5, capture only. Let tracking run. Tell the team explicitly that nothing is being billed or reviewed yet, which removes the incentive to perform for the tool.
4. Day 6, first review. Read a week of entries for the three people you wrote guidance for. Fix the Agent tab where descriptions do not name the right client.
5. Days 7 to 12, copy the guidance. Turn the instructions that worked into Skills and apply them to the rest of the team.
6. Day 13, check the paused list. Anyone who turned tracking off in the first week is telling you something about the schedule or the permissions. Ask before you re-enable.

How do you know the setup worked?

Check three things after two weeks: whether tracking windows match the hours people actually work, whether generated entries name the right clients, and whether anyone has silently paused tracking.

The Members page surfaces the third one directly, since the Tracking tab shows enabled or paused state per member. The first two come out of review. Look at a week of entries for two people on different teams and ask whether an account manager could send those descriptions to a client without editing them. If not, the fix is in that member's Agent tab, not in the capture.

Then set a weekly review cadence rather than a monthly one. Misclassified hours are cheap to fix in the same week and expensive to fix after an invoice has gone out. Team time visibility and the entry review flow are built around that loop.

Bottom line

A distributed team needs per-person configuration, not a workspace-wide default. Time zones, permissions, and AI instructions all vary by person, and a single shared setting is wrong for everyone except the admin who set it.

Open Members, choose Edit member, and work the four tabs in order: roster, tracking hours, permissions, agent instructions. Save changes when you are done, and Rize now prompts you to keep editing or discard if you close the dialog with unsaved edits. The team setup guide covers each setting and who can change it in more detail.