Timers, timesheets, and grids: every way to track time in Quanta
Some people track as they work, some reconstruct the day, some just type hours into a grid. Quanta has a view for each — here's how the List, Week, and new Grid views fit different teams, and when to flip on duration-only mode.
No two teams think about time the same way. Some people hit a timer the moment they start working. Some reconstruct their day at 5pm. Some just need to put 7 hours, Tuesday, Design into a box and move on with their lives.
Most time trackers pick one of those workflows and make everyone else adapt. Quanta ships all of them — three views and two tracking modes — so each person on your team can log hours the way they actually think. And since everything writes to the same place, it all rolls up into the same reports and invoices no matter who tracked what, how.
Here's the full menu.
First, pick your mode
Quanta has a workspace-level setting that changes what a time entry is:
- Full time tracking — entries have start and end times. You get a real picture of when work happened, not just how much of it.
- Duration only — entries just need a date and a duration. No clock times anywhere in the UI. This is for teams that bill by the hour but don't care which hours.
You'll find the switch under Administration → Workspace Settings → Timesheet. Everything below works in both modes — duration-only just hides the clocks.
The List view: a running record of your day
The List is Quanta's home base — a feed of entries grouped by day, each with a description, project, task, and tags.
It's built for people who track as they work:
- Start a timer with one click and let it run while you work. Stop it, and the entry is done.
- Add entries manually when you're logging after the fact — type a start and end time, or just a duration.
- Tell the AI what you did in plain English ("Designed the new checkout flow for Greenfield, 2 hours starting at 10am") and it builds the entry for you — project, duration, tags and all. Every plan includes 25 AI credits a month.
If your client or manager ever asks "what did you do Tuesday?", the List is the view that answers in full sentences.
The Week view: one day at a time, one week at a glance
The Week view lays your week out day by day, so you can sweep through and fill gaps in one sitting. It's the "Sunday-night timesheet" view — for people who batch their logging and want to see the whole week while they do it.
The Grid view: rows of tasks, columns of days, cells of hours
New this week: the Grid — a weekly table for teams that categorize time by task instead of writing descriptions. A row for each project and task, a column for each day, and each cell is just hours.
It's the fastest way to fill a week, and it's grown some tricks beyond the basics:
- Type hours your way —
2.5and1:15both work, and each cell saves the moment you move on. No Save button. - Your rows are already there — open a new week and the rows you used last week are waiting, empty. Hit Copy last week and last week's hours pour into the empty cells too (never overwriting anything you've typed).
- Pin your regulars — pin a project/task row and it shows up every week, even after a week off.
- Keyboard like a spreadsheet — arrow keys and Enter hop between cells, and you can paste a row of numbers straight from Excel or Google Sheets across the week.
- Know when you're done — set a daily and weekly target, and the day totals tint as you reach them, with a progress bar tracking the week.
- Safe around billing — cells with billed or closed entries lock, so a finished invoice can't be quietly edited from a timesheet.
The Grid pairs naturally with duration-only mode, but it works in full mode too.
Which one should you use?
There's no wrong answer — they all write the same entries — but as a rule of thumb:
| You… | Use |
|---|---|
| Track in real time, write what you did | List (timer + descriptions) |
| Reconstruct your day or week from memory | Week |
| Categorize by task, just need the hours | Grid |
| Don't care about clock times at all | Any view + duration-only mode |
People on the same team can each use a different view — a developer can live in the List with a running timer while the studio next door fills the Grid on Friday afternoon. Reports, budgets, and invoices don't care how the hours got there.
And the part we always mention, because it's the reason Quanta exists: all of this is a flat $10/month for your whole team — up to 100 users, no per-seat pricing.
Start tracking for free — no credit card required.