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Time tracking

At Ritza we value honesty and we have complete trust in everyone in our team. We are completely against any kind of 'bossware' and we assume that everyone fulfills the terms of their agreements with us.

Nonetheless, we still ask employees and contractors to keep basic time sheets and to submit these monthly. These sheets should show

  • How many hours you worked in a month
  • On which days you worked these hours
  • Which projects you spent them on

This is not because we don't trust that you are doing your hours. We use these time sheets:

  • For retrospective analysis and improvement on our estimates. For example, at some point we noticed that any project that involved the Microsoft stack (Azure, Power Apps, Sharepoint, Teams, etc) generally took much longer than our intitial estimates.
  • To make sure we are offering fair value to our customers. While our contracts are in words, not all words are equal. For example, if we are editing existing documentation and we quoted a per-word rate but notice that way less editing time is being used than normal (because their existing content is already in good shape and only requires some light touch ups), then we offer them extra words for free, as otherwise we would be extracting value which we don't do.
  • To protect ourselves legally. In South Africa (and many other countries) there is sometimes a grey area between contracting and employment. The authorities use time sheets as evidence that someone is a contractor, not an employee, and they can request these for the previous five years. Without this, Ritza might be liable for payroll taxes which we have already paid directly to contractors.

Tracking your time

You're welcome to use whichever tool you are most comfortable with to provide time sheets.

  • We have a Google Sheet template that you are welcome to use.
  • Some people prefer Toggl or similar, which lets you export a PDF time sheet at the end of the month and share it with your invoice.
  • Another option is Anuko. "It's totally free for individuals, one click to start and stop your sheet, has custom reports for the end of the month, can divide work into clients and projects, lots of extensions. And it's open source if you want to add your own extension. Just takes an hour to configure it properly at the start."

Some more context about time tracking

Some people have strong opinions about time tracking. We'd love to hear yours. Here are some of ours.

  • Different people have different amounts of loyalty to their employer. Some people are mainly interested in earning money. Some people want to find purpose and meaning in their work. Thousands of words have been written advocating for each of these over the other. We don't have a strong opinion either way, but we do think things should be fair. Time tracking also emphasises that we are buying hours for money at the end of the day, and that we expect you to do whatever you can to add value to Ritza during those hours.
  • This works both ways: we don't expect you to work overtime during crunchtime, but we do want you to tell us if you have hours available for us and nothing to do. Time tracking makes sure we get what we pay for, and that you don't burnout by pushing too hard to meet a deadline.
  • We don't look at time sheets regularly or use them as part of performance management or incentives and we avoid setting targets or incentives around time tracking. This is because we are conscious of Goodhart's law and the Cobra effect.