Understand desktop activity capture and privacy

How activity capture works

When tracking is active, TimeSentry Desktop observes activity from the applications you enabled. It removes idle periods and combines nearby activity from the same context into useful blocks instead of creating a record for every individual event. Activity is normally synchronized in batches about every six minutes.

Captured activity is intended to help you reconstruct work accurately. Review suggested activity in TimeSentry before treating it as a complete or billable record.

Control what is captured

Open Settings > Tracked Applications to choose which applications may contribute activity. Browser tracking is a separate option and is off by default. Disable applications that routinely contain personal, privileged, or out-of-scope work.

Use Pause tracking before personal activity, confidential work that must not be captured, or any period outside your organization's policy. Select Resume tracking afterward. If you change companies during the day, update the Company setting before continuing so new activity is attributed correctly.

Review synchronized activity

Use the app's Today's Activity, recent entries, and synchronization history to confirm that capture is running. In the web app, check the resulting suggestions, correct the company, client, project, description, duration, and billable setting as needed, and then save or submit according to your workflow.

If activity is missing

Confirm that tracking is resumed, the expected application is enabled, the desktop service is healthy, and the last heartbeat is recent. Allow one synchronization interval or choose Sync now. Check that the correct company is selected. If the issue continues, record the application name, approximate time, service status, and last heartbeat before contacting support.