Revel Roots

what apps actually cost

Team Tracking and Surveillance

Team time tracking covers two products that get procured together and are not the same thing.

One allocates hours to projects. The other records what people did at their computers. The first is an accounting instrument; the second is surveillance, whatever the marketing calls it. A workplace-oriented example is employee monitoring software; it shows how tracking is packaged when the buyer is an employer rather than an individual.

The line is visible in the feature list.

On one side

Time allocated to projects or clients, entered by the person doing the work. For a broader time-tracking or productivity comparison, TrustRadius time-tracking reviews is another useful reference.

Aggregate reporting — how much went to each project, by team rather than by individual.

Approval workflows for timesheets.

Purpose: billing, resourcing, forecasting. The output describes work, not people, and it is the same information a timesheet has always carried.

On the other side

Periodic screenshots of the employee's screen.

Application and window-title logging, which captures document names, search queries and message threads.

Keystroke and mouse activity levels, presented as "activity scores".

Idle detection that flags time away from the machine.

Webcam capture, in some products.

Purpose: verifying that someone was working. The output describes a person's minute-by-minute behaviour, and no amount of framing makes that a timesheet.

Why they are sold as one

Both are bought by the same person for adjacent reasons, and vendors bundle them because the second commands a higher price and the first justifies the purchase.

The higher tiers are where monitoring lives. An organisation buying project allocation frequently receives monitoring features it did not specifically want, enabled by default or one toggle away.

And the language is shared. "Visibility", "accountability", "insights" describe both, which is why reading the feature list matters more than reading the positioning.

What it costs the organisation

Not a moral argument — practical effects that show up in the work.

People optimise for the metric. Activity scores measure keyboard and mouse frequency, so they reward typing and penalise reading, thinking and talking to colleagues. The behaviour follows the measure.

Trust is expensive to rebuild. Introducing monitoring is a statement about the default assumption, and it is heard as one regardless of the stated reason.

And it usually does not answer the question. If the concern is output, measure output. Screen activity is a proxy that correlates weakly and is easy to game — and gaming it is a skill people acquire quickly.

If you are on the receiving end

Ask what is captured, specifically, from the list above. Reasonable question and in many jurisdictions there is legal backing for asking.

Ask about retention. How long, who can see it, what happens when you leave.

Ask whether it runs outside working hours, particularly on a personal device or in a hybrid arrangement.

And know that consent rules differ by jurisdiction. Several require notification, some require agreement, and personal-device monitoring is treated differently from company-device monitoring almost everywhere.

If you are buying

Decide which product you need before looking at any.

If it is project allocation, buy that and confirm the monitoring features can be disabled — not hidden, disabled.

If it is genuinely monitoring, be explicit internally about what is being recorded and why. The version that damages an organisation is the one introduced quietly as a timesheet upgrade, discovered later by an employee reading the feature list.

The short version