Duration versus begin and end times

The first question on the Settings tab of company settings is How does your team track time?, and the line under it is honest about the stakes: "This changes how the timesheet screen works for everyone." There is no per-user override and no way to mix the two.

The two options are presented as cards:

• Start & end-times, "Entries live on a calendar: 09:00 to 11:30. Best for detailed day planning."
• Duration only, "Just log 2h 30m per task per day. Fastest to fill in."

Pick on the basis of whether anyone needs to know when work happened. Teams that only need totals per project fill in far more time, far more reliably, with durations.

What Start & end-times looks like

The timesheet screen is a calendar grid. The toolbar has Day and Week buttons, plus Multi for owners, admins and managers who manage more than one person. Arrows and a Today button move the period.

Calendar overlays events from a connected calendar so you can drag them into place. Table switches to a list view for one day, which has Copy previous day; Calendar view takes you back.

Two settings exist only in this mode and vanish from the form when you choose the other:

• Log time between, "Visible hours on the calendar." A two-handled slider fixing the hours the grid draws. New companies start at 07:00 to 19:00.
• Allow overlapping events, "Two entries can share the same time slot."

Company non-working days and personal absences show as chips above the day they fall on.

What Duration only looks like

The screen becomes two much simpler views with a Day and Week toggle. Week is what people land on until they choose otherwise, and the choice is remembered per person.

Week is a grid: one row per project and task, one column per active day, a Week total, and Copy previous week. You type 1:30 or 1,5 for an hour and a half, or move the value with the up and down arrow keys in steps of your Minimum time to log. Entries save as you type. The decimal separator follows your number format.

Day lists a single date's entries and is the only place notes can be added; the week grid has no notes column. It has Copy previous day.

Log time between and Allow overlapping events are hidden, and there is no calendar or table view to switch to.

Side by side

What the data looks like underneath

Every entry stores a start and an end in both modes. In Duration only Temponia supplies them: whenever an entry's duration changes it anchors that entry at 09:00 on its date, in your company time zone, and sets the end to 09:00 plus the duration. Nothing on screen shows those times, but they are what the entry really holds.

That has one visible consequence in reporting. With Duration only selected, timesheet reports drop the Time grouping and the begin and end columns entirely, and everything is expressed as durations. See finding the right report.

Switching between the two

Switching does not rewrite anything already recorded. It changes what people see and what they can enter from that point on.

• Entries recorded with real begin and end times keep them. Switch to Duration only and they still total correctly; their times simply stop being shown.
• Entries recorded while Duration only was on all sit at 09:00. Switch back to Start & end-times and a day with four such entries draws them at the same spot on the grid, because that is genuinely where they are. Drag them into place or leave them; the totals do not change either way.
• No entry ever loses its duration, and none is deleted.

Pick a quiet moment. The change applies to everyone the next time they open their timesheet, mid-week included. If you are switching a workspace that is already in use, tell the team first and do it between periods.

The hours limit still applies to timers

One thing the form does not make obvious. Log time between disappears in Duration only, but the hours it stores keep applying to timers. A timer cannot be started before the start hour, or at or after the end hour, and Temponia refuses with Couldn't start timer.

So a duration-only company that never sees the setting can still find that nobody can start a timer at 06:30, because the stored range is the default 07:00 to 19:00. To widen it, switch to Start & end-times for a moment, move the slider, save, and switch back.

A stopped timer becomes an ordinary entry in either mode, subject to your rounding setting. The mobile apps and the Jira panel read the same company setting and follow whichever mode you choose.