Half the team is not in the building
A door-mounted biometric device stops being the source of truth the moment work-from-home becomes normal, and the register ends up being reconstructed from chat messages.
Industries
Employee management for software companies
Hybrid attendance that a biometric machine cannot answer, hours attributed to projects and sprints, and a desktop tracker whose behaviour is published in enough detail that a technical team can evaluate it rather than resent it.
The problems this sector actually has
Written from what customers in this sector tell us goes wrong, rather than from a generic list of benefits.
Nobody knows where the hours went
A sprint slips and the retrospective has opinions rather than data. Effort was never attributed to anything, so the conversation cannot be about numbers.
Developers distrust monitoring, correctly
A technical team will read the product before installing it, and most trackers do not survive that reading. Anything that looks like a keylogger will be rejected, loudly.
Client contracts constrain the data
Enterprise and regulated clients increasingly write terms about where their project data may live, and a screenshot of a developer machine is full of their code.
Leave balances are a December argument
A spreadsheet maintained by whoever inherited it produces a disagreement every year at exactly the point people want to take leave.
Payroll wants a clean file
And gets a spreadsheet that somebody assembled by hand on the 28th, with the errors that implies.
How Employee Desk is used here
Attendance that survives hybrid
Attendance is recorded against the employee rather than a device, so somebody working from home produces the same shape of record as somebody in the office. Per-employee shifts mean a team on flexible hours and a support rota can coexist without a second system.
Hours where the work is
Tracked time attaches to a project and a task, so effort per feature is a query rather than a reconstruction. Daily work reports cover teams that will not accept a desktop agent, and both roll up against the same project.
A tracker a technical team can evaluate
Published behaviour, in detail: what is recorded, what is never recorded, that the tray icon cannot be hidden, that stopping it stops recording, and that keystroke content is never captured. Send the privacy page to the team before you install anything — it is written to be circulated.
Client data stays where the contract says
Self-hosting puts the whole application, screenshots included, on your own server. For a company whose screenshots contain client source code, this is usually the deciding factor rather than a preference.
A configuration that usually works
A starting point rather than a prescription. Most teams adjust one or two of these in the first month.
| Setting | Typical choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | Growth on cloud, or self-hosted from 60 people | The tracker matters; screenshots usually do not |
| Screenshots | Off | Activity and hours answer the question. Captures cost trust for no extra information |
| Shift | Flexible start with a wide grace window | Enforcing 09:30 on a team that ships at midnight is a fight not worth having |
| Tracker rollout | Client-billable teams first | Where the hours actually need to be defensible |
| Work reports | Everyone, daily | The lowest-friction module and the one people keep using |
| Retention | 7 to 14 days if screenshots are ever enabled | Short retention is the answer to most objections |
| Deployment | Cloud, moving to self-hosted when a client requires it | Migration is supported, so this is not a one-way door |
Frequently asked questions
Will developers accept a tracker?
More often than you expect, if two things are true: the behaviour is published so they can read it, and screenshots are off. The rejections we hear about are almost always of covert tools or of screenshot capture nobody explained first.
Can we track hours per sprint?
Hours attach to projects and tasks, so a sprint modelled as a project gives you effort per sprint. There is no native integration with issue trackers today; the REST API is the route if you need the two systems joined.
Does it integrate with Jira or GitHub?
Not natively. The REST API and webhooks are how customers connect it, which is an integration project rather than a switch. If native integrations are essential, say so early.
Can we self-host because of a client contract?
Yes, and it is the most common reason software companies buy the licence. See self-hosted deployment; installation is Docker Compose, single host on 4 vCPU · 8 GB RAM · 200 GB disk.
Do we have to use the tracker at all?
No. Attendance, leave, projects, tasks and daily work reports are the whole product for a lot of software customers, and no desktop agent is installed anywhere.
Try it on your own team this week
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