One clock-in starts the day. The desktop agent captures active time, breaks, and idle gaps until you clock out. Manual entries cover off-screen work. Approval workflow keeps payroll honest. One source of truth — for hours, for invoices, for trust.
One click starts the agent's working session on macOS, Windows, or Linux. Every signal below is captured continuously until the employee clicks Clock out — nothing before, nothing after.
The agent reads which window the OS reports as focused. Browser tab? URL too. No keylogging. No screen video.
Five minutes without keyboard or mouse becomes idle. Idle minutes are subtracted from billable totals.
A break pauses billable accumulation but keeps the day open. Reflected on the employee's HUD in real time.
Interval is admin-set (default 10 min). Employees see their own captures from their own dashboard.
Manual entries — site visits, client calls, deep-work blocks without the agent — go through the same approval queue as auto entries. Managers approve a week in under two minutes; rejections come with a comment so finance never has to chase context.
| Employee | Hours | Reason | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anita Desai | 2h 30m | Atlas — client site visit, no laptop | |
| Marcus Wong | 1h 15m | Stage release — out of office | |
| Priya Mehta | 3h 00m | Q3 strategy offsite |
Every project carries a budget, an hourly rate, and a billing type. Approved entries roll up the moment they hit the queue — no end-of-month reconciliation. Cross 80% of budget and the card flips amber; cross 100% and it goes red before anyone clocks the next hour.
Eight more things that matter when one timer turns into a hundred employees and ten thousand entries a month.
Every timestamp UTC at rest, every figure in the viewer's timezone. Cross-timezone teams stop arguing about hours.
New apps and URLs land already classified as productive, unproductive, or neutral using your own category list. Admin rules always win — the AI is just the helpful first pass.
Every edit and approval is logged with manager id, old value, and timestamp. Append-only, exportable on demand.
CSV, PDF, and a REST API. Custom column layout you control, locked book currency, audit trail intact. Your accounting tool reads the file as-is.
Shifts ship with grace periods and timezones. Late / early flags are computed once, used everywhere.
Keyboard + mouse event frequency, never keystroke content. Same number on the HUD, the dashboard, and the report.
"Friday timesheets were a half-day every week, and two clients always disputed the total."
Approval queue clears Friday morning. Every billed hour links back to a screenshot timestamp and an approved entry.
"Shift fairness gets argued every week — overtime, late, partial days were all spreadsheet math."
Shifts + grace + late detection are computed once per employee per day. Overtime totals roll into the payroll export — your payroll tool reads them directly.
"Utilization was a Q-end figure, which meant it was a Q+1 problem. Bench burned for weeks before anyone saw it."
Realisation and utilization update in real time. The bench shows up on Monday's dashboard, not next quarter's review.
We tried four time-tracking tools before Fruitful. This is the first one where finance didn't ask us to re-export the data.
Our employees actually like the HUD. That's a sentence I never thought I'd write about time tracking software.
14 days, full access, no card. Onboarding takes about ten minutes — most teams ship their first invoice the following Monday.