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Hit the nail on the head here! Asking teams to fill out timesheets retrospectively from memory is a no-go... And for a firm scaling 1000+ clients, manual tracking is impossible to manage. While we all hope Xero builds this natively someday, my team actually got tired of waiting and built a tool that does exactly what Dean originally suggested (it's called TimeWaveTracker). It runs silently in the background with no start/stop timers and automatically logs time to the correct client. Hopefully, this helps anyone on this thread who needs a way to automate this today!

Hi Jeanne-Mari, I completely agree and upvote! The manual timer drain in XPM is a huge issue, especially when you are jumping between clients and tasks all day. It is helpful to have something that detects the active client and suggests (or tracks automatically) time entries. We actually just finished building a tool that does exactly this for Xero (named TimeWaveTracker). It runs silently in the background and handles the sorting for you. We are also actively developing the next phase to track time spent outside of Xero (like in Dext, Excel, and Outlook) to link back to the client. Hopefully, this helps anyone else in the thread who is tired of manual timers!

It would be great if Xero Practice Manager included an automatic time-tracking feature similar to Memetime.

Instead of manually starting and stopping timers, XPM could detect which client, Xero organisation, or work files a user is actively working on and automatically suggest time entries. Users could then simply review and approve their time at the end of the day.

This would:

Reduce missed billable hours.
Save time on admin.
Improve the accuracy of timesheets.
Make time tracking much easier for accounting and bookkeeping practices that switch between multiple clients throughout the day.

This would be a huge productivity improvement for firms using XPM.

Xero knows which client (Organisation) you are working in and what tasks you are carrying out based on what you are actually doing in Xero. It then follows that Xero can record this information against time and keep time sheets (track time) for employees and managers.

Background. Keeping timesheets manually is an almost impossible task and a massive bone of contention between employees and Accountancy practices. Most time sheets are completed retrospectively from memory and at best you get an estimate of times. Now that Xero and PM are consolidated on Xero HQ. It follows that you could automate time tracking for practices and timesheet recording for approval by employees.

This is an easy win that fits perfectly with Xero's process automation goals and massively benefits/supports loyal Xero Accountants.

ADD: Time tracking built into XERO for bookkeepers.

Its a hard sell to move hundreds of bookkeeping accounts to xero when there is no way to track our time within a clients file.

We are a large firm with 10,000+ tax clients and growing. We are trying to simplify time and billing, with over 1000+ bookkeeping clients spread out over half a dozen services and are trying to find more built-in solutions. I am quite surprised this isn't built into xero yet.