Timely

Timely is automatic time tracking software that records what you worked on in the background instead of asking you to start and stop timers. A companion app called Memory sits on your machine and logs the documents, sites, meetings and apps you used, then AI drafts timesheet entries from that activity for you to review and approve. The pitch is straightforward: people forget to run timers, so let the computer remember and turn approval into a few minutes at the end of the day.

What you can actually do with it

Timely is aimed at teams who bill or report on hours but hate the admin of recording them.

• Capture activity automatically. Memory tracks time spent in apps, documents, calls and calendar events without any manual timer.
• Turn activity into timesheets with AI. Suggested entries are matched to projects and clients so approving a day is closer to editing than typing.
• Keep raw activity private. Your captured timeline is visible only to you until you approve entries, which is the design choice that makes automatic tracking palatable to staff.
• See project health. Dashboards compare logged hours against budgets and estimates so you can spot an overrunning project while there is still time to act.
• Plan people and capacity. Planned time and a people view show who is over- or under-committed across the coming weeks.
• Separate billable from internal work. Billable flags, cost rates and tags let you report on realisation and profitability per client or project.
• Sync with your project tools. Integrations with tools such as Jira, Asana, ClickUp, monday.com, Trello, Google Calendar, Outlook and accounting packages pull real work items in as tracking context.

Who it fits best

Timely suits consultancies, agencies, law and design firms, and in-house teams where accurate hours matter for billing or forecasting but timesheet compliance is a running battle. It is especially useful where people switch context constantly and lose an hour a week reconstructing what they did. Managers get capacity and budget visibility without nagging.

It is a poor fit for field or shift workforces who need clock-in kiosks and rostering rather than desktop activity capture, and for solo freelancers on tight budgets, since there is no free tier to grow into. It also assumes desk work: if most of your time is offline, automatic capture has little to observe.

Things worth knowing before you commit

• There is no free plan. You get a trial, then it is a paid per-user subscription, and lower tiers cap the number of users and projects.
• Automatic capture needs a conversation with your team. Timely explicitly avoids screenshots and keystroke logging, and keeps the timeline private until approval, but installing a background tracker still needs to be explained rather than imposed.
• AI suggestions still need review. Auto-drafted entries get better as it learns your projects, but early on you will correct a fair number of allocations.
• Billing and expenses are lighter than dedicated tools. Treat it as a time and profitability system that feeds your accounting software, not as a replacement for it.
• It does not manage the work. There are projects and tasks, but planning, dependencies and collaboration live in your project management tool.

Alternatives to compare it against

If you want manual tracking that is cheap and familiar, Toggl Track and Clockify cover the same billable-hours reporting with a free or low-cost entry point, at the price of relying on people to press start. If automatic capture is the appeal, Memtime and RescueTime take similar approaches with different emphases, one on offline timeline reconstruction, the other on productivity insight. If hours are mainly an input to invoicing, Harvest or the timers built into your existing project management suite may be enough. And for shift-based teams, workforce scheduling and attendance systems solve a different problem better.

Plan limits, tier contents and per-user pricing change over time. Check Timely’s own pricing page for the current details before you commit.

Further reading

• Best Project Time Management Software for Small Businesses — the manual-timer alternatives Timely is trying to replace.
• Time Tracking Software for Accounting Firms: A Comparison Guide — written for the professional-services firms where timesheet compliance is the running battle.
• 7 Key Features of Top Resource Scheduling Software — useful for judging Timely’s planned-time and capacity views against dedicated tools.
• 10 Best Mobile Workforce Scheduling Apps 2024 — the right category instead if your team is shift-based rather than at a desk.

Have you used Timely?

One sentence is enough. Would you pick it again, and why or why not? We publish the critical reviews too — that is the point.