Time Entry Compliance: The Silent Profitability Killer

Every MSP owner I've talked to knows time entry matters. Very few have actually solved it. The pattern is always the same: management announces that time tracking needs to improve, there's a week of compliance, then everyone drifts back to bulk-entering time at the end of the day or forgetting entirely.

The problem isn't discipline. It's friction. If entering time takes longer than it should, requires too many decisions, or interrupts the technician's flow, it won't happen consistently no matter how many reminders you send.

Here's how I approach time entry compliance in PSA consulting — and it has nothing to do with nagging your team.

The friction problem

Open your PSA right now and time how long it takes to enter a time entry from scratch. Navigate to the ticket. Open the time entry form. Select the work type. Select the agreement (if applicable). Enter start and end times or duration. Add a note. Save.

If that process takes more than 30 seconds, there's room to optimize. If it requires decisions that the tech has to think about — which work type? which agreement? billable or non-billable? — there's even more room.

The goal is to make time entry so fast and so easy that it's easier to do it than to skip it. That means:

Default work types based on ticket type or board, so the tech doesn't have to pick from a dropdown of 30 options. Auto-populated agreement references based on the client, so the tech doesn't need to know which agreement covers this work. A time entry interface that's accessible from the ticket without navigating away. A timer function that runs while the tech works, so they just click "stop" when they're done instead of reconstructing their day from memory later.

Both ConnectWise and HaloPSA support timer-based time entry. Both support default work types. Both support agreement auto-population. Most MSPs just haven't configured these features.

The accountability system

Reducing friction gets you from 60% compliance to 85%. Getting from 85% to 95%+ requires a lightweight accountability system.

I set up a daily automated report that shows each tech's logged hours versus expected hours. If a tech is scheduled for 8 hours and logged 5, that's a gap. The report goes to the service manager, who addresses it in the morning standup — not punitively, just matter-of-factly. "Hey, I see you had 3 hours unaccounted for yesterday. Anything missing?"

The report should also show tickets that were updated (status change, notes added) but have no time entry. That's the clearest signal that work was done but not logged. It's almost always not intentional — the tech resolved the issue, updated the ticket, and forgot to stop the timer or add a time entry because they were already moving to the next ticket.

Why it matters more than you think

When time entry is incomplete, every downstream metric is wrong. Client profitability? Wrong — because you don't know the real labor cost. Tech utilization? Wrong — because the denominator is understated. Agreement margin analysis? Wrong — because the labor consumed against the agreement is underreported.

I worked with an MSP that was convinced a particular client was profitable. Good revenue, reasonable ticket volume, no complaints. When we fixed time entry compliance and ran the profitability numbers with accurate data, the client was underwater by $2,800/month. The techs were doing the work — they just weren't logging all of it, so the numbers told a false story.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure. And you cannot measure anything in an MSP without accurate time data.

The configuration changes I make

Specific PSA configuration changes that improve compliance:

Enable mandatory time entry on ticket status change to "Closed." No time entry, no closure. This is the single most effective configuration change for compliance.

Set default work types per board so techs don't face a blank dropdown. Service board → "Remote Support" by default. Projects board → "Project Work" by default.

Configure time entry rounding rules. If your billing is in 15-minute increments, configure the system to round appropriately so techs aren't doing mental math.

Enable the timer widget. Both platforms have it. Make sure it's visible and accessible. Techs who use timers log 20–30% more time than techs who enter duration manually after the fact.

Set up time entry validation rules. Flag entries over 4 hours on a single ticket (possible, but worth reviewing). Flag entries with no notes (useless for billing disputes). Flag entries where the work type doesn't match the ticket type.

None of these are heavy-handed. They're guard rails that make the right behavior the easy behavior.

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