Proposal: Time Logging, Budgeting & Accounts for Taiga

Contribution
1

Hi @TaigaTeam and community,

I am Christofer, a developer at OpenCraft, and we’re currently evaluating Taiga as a replacement for Jira across our organization. Taiga covers most of what we need out of the box, but we’re missing three main things: Time Logging, Budgeting, and Accounts (a lightweight entity for grouping/billing work).

Before anything else: we are not proposing a play/pause timer. We read the existing discussion on Why is there no Time Tracking?, and our proposal is designed to be consistent with that position — not to reopen it. What we want to build is a structured, native version of the workaround the team already recommends in that thread: manual time logging plus reporting, extended with budgeting and account-level tracking, mainly to support internal billing and budget management.

Our intention is to build this upstream-first. So it becomes part of Taiga core and benefits the wider community. We believe it’s a good fit for core because:

  • It doesn’t touch the contested “timer” feature; it’s built on the same manual-entry approach Taiga already suggests as a workaround.

  • It addresses a real, recurring need the community has raised (accurate time tracking for billing), without adding scope Taiga has chosen not to support.

We’ve put together the full set of user stories — what each feature does and the acceptance criteria for each — here: Proposal Document

A couple of questions we’d love your input on before we start development:

  • Would this be something the Taiga Team could accept as a contribution to Taiga Core?

  • If not as core, would the Taiga Team be open to officially adopting and maintaining this as a plugin, rather than it staying as a plugin we maintain entirely on our own?

We’re happy to follow whatever process works best on your end: discussing scope further, preparing wireframes, or anything else needed to move this forward. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks!

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2

We were faced with this issue about five years ago, we’d been using sophisticated software like Toggle to log time. Then Toggle decided to become really expensive and add project management. So we switched to Clockify, whose manifesto was inexpensive time tracking. Then Clockify became enterprisse software with some kind of project management of its own.

What we finally settled on is Kimai. It’s a little bit more time to set up in the first place but Kimai looks good and doesn’t change. So we use whatever project management tools we need. Time tracking is independent of the tools so no matter what happens to project management our time tracking and billing remains solid.

Other tool and workflows have changed in this time, but we’ve barely had to touch Kimai. As a bonus, since Kimai is open source and mostly CSS and javascript one can customise any screens one wants easily for faster logging.

I’d heartily suggest divorcing project management and time tracking.