Log Your Time by Asking Claude
An MCP server that lets Claude log your day, fix what you got wrong, and fill your timesheet from your calendar, your commits, or its own session, without leaving the conversation.
The most accurate timesheet is the one you never have to remember to fill in.
That has always been the argument for the desktop timer. It now extends somewhere new: if you already work alongside Claude, it can keep your timesheet for you. You say what you did in the sentence you were going to say anyway, and it lands in the same timesheet that feeds your reports and invoices.
You: log 2 hours this morning on the Helio portal, fixing the invoice import.
Claude: Logged 2h to Patient Portal for Helio Labs.
Notice what happened. You said "the Helio portal" and it logged to Patient Portal for Helio Labs. Claude read your project list and worked out which one you meant, so you never have to remember ids or exact names. When it isn't certain, it asks which you meant before saving anything.
Setting it up
One command:
claude mcp add quanta --env QUANTA_API_KEY=qta_live_... -- npx -y quanta-mcp
Create the key first under Administration → API Keys. For Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any other MCP client, setup is in the readme.
Five ways to use it
Each of these is a real conversation. The panels play them back.
Say your whole day in one go
The end-of-day version. One paragraph, the way you'd tell a colleague, and Claude splits it into entries, works out the durations from the times you mentioned, and leaves lunch out.
Correct as you go
Most timesheets are abandoned at the first mistake, because fixing an entry means finding it. Here you just say what was wrong. Claude knows which entry you mean because it logged it a minute ago.
Log your meetings from your calendar
If Claude also has your calendar connected, through a calendar MCP server or one of the built-in connectors, it can read the day's events and log the ones that were work. It will skip the one called Lunch without being told.
Turn your commits into entries
The same idea for developers. With a GitHub MCP server connected, "what did I ship today" becomes a list of commits, grouped by repository, logged one entry per project with the commit messages as the description.
Let Claude Code read its own day
This one only works in Claude Code, because it reads local files. Claude Code keeps a transcript of every session on your machine. Ask it to read today's and log your day, and it works out what you spent the hours on from what it was doing with you. If you already spend your day in Claude Code, your timesheet is sitting in those transcripts.
None of the last three need anything from Quanta beyond the API key. The other servers are Claude's, and the combining is Claude's. Quanta just has to be one of the tools on the table.
What it can do
MCP is a small open standard for giving an assistant real tools rather than a text box. Point Claude at the Quanta server and it gains fourteen of them, one for every endpoint of the public API.
get_current_timer | Whether a timer is running, and what it's tracking |
start_timer | Starts one, stopping any already running |
stop_timer | Stops it and saves the entry |
log_time | Logs a completed block of time you specify in minutes |
update_time_entry | Edits one entry: description, duration, start, project, task, billable |
delete_time_entry | Permanently removes an entry |
batch_update_time_entries | Moves or re-flags up to 100 entries at once, all or nothing |
list_time_entries | Your recent entries, with their ids |
list_projects | Projects you can log against, with tasks, billing and budget progress |
list_clients | Clients in the workspace |
list_tags | Tags available for labelling entries |
get_time_report | Grouped totals by client, project, user or task, filterable |
get_detailed_report | The individual entries behind a report, across everyone |
get_recent_changes | Everything that changed since a timestamp, deletions included |
Every one of them takes plain names. "Log two hours on Quanta, Dev task, tagged migration" needs no lookup step first, and opaque ids work too, so anything Claude has already read can be passed straight back. A name that matches nothing, or matches more than one thing, comes back asking which you meant rather than guessing, because quietly reporting on the wrong person is worse than one more question.
The key acts as you. It sees exactly what you see, changes exactly what you can change, and time logged through it is attributed to you, the same as if you had used the app. Entries are marked as API-created, so you can tell them apart from web and desktop ones in the detailed report and the Excel export.
Two boundaries worth knowing. The three reporting tools span the whole workspace, so they check the same permission the equivalent screen does: if you cannot open the report in Quanta, Claude cannot pull it either. And list_time_entries only ever shows your own work, which is the API's behaviour rather than a setting, so a question about what someone else did goes through the detailed report instead.
Why an assistant is a good fit for this
Time tracking fails in a specific way. It isn't that people refuse to do it, it's that recording the work interrupts the work. So it gets deferred to Friday, and Friday's version is a guess.
An assistant that is already in the conversation removes the interruption. And an assistant that can also see your calendar, your commits, or its own transcript doesn't need you to remember at all.
Underneath
The MCP server is a thin client over Quanta's public REST API, which we wrote about earlier this month. There is nothing the server can do that you cannot do directly, so if you would rather build your own integration than use an assistant, the same surface is yours. get_recent_changes exists for exactly that: ask it what moved since a timestamp, deletions included, and keep another system in step without polling everything.
Both are available on every paid plan.
What's next
A hosted MCP server is the obvious next step, so connecting it is a click rather than a config file, and so it works with assistants that expect a remote server rather than a local one.
If there is a tool you want that isn't in that list, or a way of using this we haven't thought of, tell us before we guess. Write to support@quanta.is.