Assigning a time tracking policy ensures each employee follows the right rules for logging hours.
Once policies are created, you need to apply them to entire subsidiaries—automating compliance and keeping time tracking consistent across your team.
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 by Subsidiary
Time tracking policies are assigned based on the subsidiary:
Go to Settings > Company Info > Subsidiary.
Assign a Default Time Tracking Policy to the subsidiary.
All users in that subsidiary (visible in their profile under Info Tab > Workplace) will automatically inherit the policy rules.
📌 Users cannot be assigned policies individually—policy rules always follow the subsidiary assignment.
Setting a Default Policy
You can choose one of your time tracking policies as the default. When a new user is added to a subsidiary that doesn’t have a default policy, this policy will be applied automatically. To set a default policy:
Go to Settings > Time Tracking Policies.
Select Set as Default.
Only one policy can be the default at a time. You can change it at any moment.
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 generally 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 Step
For help creating or managing policies, visit the Managing Time Tracking Policies article.
