Assigning a time tracking policy ensures each employee follows the right rules for logging hours.
Once policies are created, you can assign them directly to individual users or teams, keeping time tracking consistent across your organization.
Setting up time tracking policies is available on the Ultimate subscription plan.
Before You Start
Make sure your time tracking policies are set up. If you haven’t created any yet, check out our guide on Setting up Time Tracking Policies first.
Assigning a Policy to Users
To assign a policy:
Go to Resourcing > Employees and make sure you are in the Directory tab.
Select the user(s) by ticking the boxes next to the people's names.
Select Assign time tracking policy and select the policy from the list.
📌 Tip: Open the Fields menu and select the Time tracking policy field to add it to your view, then edit the policy directly inline in the table for each user.
You can assign a time tracking policy directly from a user's profile by navigating to the Time tab and selecting Edit.
Setting a Default Policy
To automatically apply a policy to new users, open the three-dot menu next to the policy in Settings > Time Tracking and select Apply to New Users.
📌 If no default is set, no restrictions apply unless a policy is manually assigned.
Good to Know
1) What happens when a user tries to track time against a rule?
If tracking is disabled: The day or entry field will be grayed out, and users won’t be able to enter time.
If tracking is allowed with limitations:
Daily max hours will be enforced (e.g. tracking will stop at 10h)
Additional entries exceeding the limit will be blocked
Custom warnings (if set) will be displayed
2) What happens on partial time off days?
If someone has, for example, 4 hours off, tracking is allowed up to the remaining capacity (e.g. 6h of a 10h workday).
3) What if someone enters time in two parts and exceeds the daily limit?
Users are never blocked from creating time entries. Instead, Productive trims the time to comply with the policy rule:
If a user reaches the maximum allowed hours for the day, they can still track time, but any excess will be set to 0 hours.
Users can later adjust the time on their entries as needed to reflect the actual hours worked.
📌 Important: During the Beta phase, only worked time is trimmed—billable time is not adjusted.
Next Steps
For help creating or managing policies, visit the Managing Time Tracking Policies article.
