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Effort tracking

Effort tracking without timesheets

Flowstate derives effort from the project tools and code activity your team already produces, normalized so every person's day sums to 100%. Leads review it in minutes, and the result is strong enough to carry a CapEx claim.

The problem

Timesheets are fiction, and finance builds on them anyway

Engineers backfill them from memory on the last day of the month. Leads approve them without reading. Then those numbers become the basis for capitalization, R&D claims and every cost-per-project figure the board sees.

The work already leaves a record. Tickets move, branches merge, reviews land. That record is better evidence than anyone's memory.

How it works

Read from the work, not asked of the worker

Status transitions in Jira, Azure DevOps and Linear say what moved and when. GitHub activity says who was in the code. Flowstate blends both into a per-person allocation where every day sums to 100%.

CapEx, OpEx, leave and unattributed time each get their own band, so the split finance needs falls out of the same data.

Sarah Chen, this month
CapEx 58% OpEx 24% Leave 8% Unattributed 10%
Total 100%. Submission blocked until the 10% unattributed is resolved.
The Effort Workbench

Review a team in minutes, not an afternoon

A spreadsheet-style grid built for the keyboard. Leads tab through people, type a few characters of a project name and move on. The CapEx, OpEx, leave and unattributed bands recompute live as they type.

Keyboard first

Arrow keys, tab, type, enter. Reviewing a squad of eight is a few minutes of typing, not a meeting.

Live recomputation

Every edit updates the bands instantly, so the lead watches the CapEx position change as they allocate.

Forgiving search

Project search tolerates typos. The point is speed, and speed dies on an exact-match dropdown.

Honest by design

Unattributed time is named, never hidden

Non-project time and unlinked project time are separate buckets, and neither is ever silently defaulted onto a project. Leads cannot submit while anything sits unattributed, so the gaps get resolved instead of buried.

Once approved, allocations lock for audit. That is what makes the same numbers safe to hand to your auditor and your tax advisor.

Team standings

The leaderboard does the chasing

Standings show overdue against approved and CapEx against target per team. One overdue report drops a team off the leaderboard, which turns month-end chasing into a thing teams do to themselves.

Submission standings
1 Payments Approved 8/8
2 Platform Approved 11/11
Growth 1 overdue
One overdue report and you're off the board.
Capabilities

How effort tracking works

Derived, not declared

Effort comes from status transitions in Jira, Azure DevOps and Linear, blended with GitHub code activity. Nobody fills in a form on Friday afternoon.

Every day sums to 100%

Allocations are normalized so each person's day always adds up. No double counting, no missing afternoons, no 130% weeks.

Locked once approved

Approved allocations lock for audit. The number your CapEx claim rests on in March is the number the lead approved in January.

Typo-tolerant search

Leads assign time to projects by typing. The search forgives misspellings, so "paymnets" still finds the payments refresh.

Retire the timesheet

Book a demo and see a month of effort reviewed, balanced to 100% and locked for audit in one sitting.