Setting up your organization

This is the first thing to configure. Navigate to Settings > General. Only the organization Owner can change these settings. Six tabs, each controlling a different aspect of the application. The choices you make here cascade through everything that follows — they determine what features your team sees, how time entries behave, and whether project planning tools are available. Every other guide assumes these settings are in place.

Start with the Basics

The General tab has two fields, Organization Name and Contact Email, and a Product updates & marketing switch. The name appears across the application header and in exported reports. The contact email is used for account communications. Turn the switch on if you want product updates and marketing announcements sent to that address; account security, billing, and critical product messages are always sent. Set both fields, save, and move on.

Choose Your Features

The Application tab is where you make the decisions that shape what AbleTime looks like for your team.

The most important choice is Project Manager. Enabling it unlocks project planning: Tasks, Epics, the Flow Board, Timeline, and Ledger. If your team plans and tracks work beyond just logging hours, turn this on. If you only need time tracking against projects and categories, leave it off — you can always enable it later without losing data.

Billing enables client invoicing. Turn this on if you charge clients for time. It adds billing fields to projects, categories, and the invoice module.

Dashboard turns on the Dashboard, which shows the tasks running late, your pinned custom reports and how your organization's time is going.

Below the feature toggles, the User Management section controls how your team gets into the system. Enable User Invites allows Admins to send individual invitations. Enable Bulk Invites adds the option to onboard multiple users at once.

The Date Format (Locale) setting determines how dates and times display throughout the application. System Default follows the browser locale. The other options force a specific format for all users: US (MM/dd/yyyy, 12h) or EU (dd/MM/yyyy, 24h). Choose based on your team's location, but remember that international team members can choose their own format in their profile.

Configure Time Tracking Defaults

The Time Tracker tab controls how time entries behave across your organization. These defaults apply to everyone.

Week Starts On — Sunday or Monday. This determines the calendar grid layout, which day the weekly view starts on, and how weekly totals are calculated. Match your organization's work week.

Default Minute Increment sets the snap interval on the calendar. Set it to 15 minutes for billing-focused teams — entries round neatly into quarter hours. Set it to 1 or 5 minutes for precise tracking. This affects everyone's calendar grid.

Enable Timers determines whether the timer feature exists at all. When unchecked, the timer button, timer bar, and Productivity Drawer timer panel all disappear. If your team tracks time after the fact rather than live, turn this off to reduce clutter. Max Timer Duration caps how long a running timer can go (1–12 hours) before it automatically stops — a safeguard against forgotten timers.

Description required forces every time entry to include a description before saving. Turn this on if you need descriptions for billing detail or audit trails. Leave it off if your team tracks time quickly against project and category combinations and doesn't need per-entry notes.

Show Weekend by Default controls whether Saturday and Sunday columns appear on the calendar immediately, without each user toggling them on manually.

Set Up Project Manager

The Project Manager tab controls how project planning behaves once Project Manager is enabled on the Application tab. Refer to the Project Manager Settings page to learn about these various features.

The features build on each other:

• Enable Backlog adds a Backlog column to the Flow Board — a holding area for work that has been defined but not yet started.

• Allow Backlog Hours lets users log time against backlog tasks — they appear in the time entry picker. Only available when Backlog is on.

• Enable Epics lets you group tasks into deliverable-scoped containers. This is how you track progress, scope, and burn rate across a body of work. Requires Backlog to be on.

• Capacity Planning adds capacity types that connect users to work based on skill. You define types (Design, Development, Management), assign them to users with hours per week, and associate them with categories and tasks. AbleTime uses this to filter task visibility and inform resource planning.

• Enable Stages adds sub-stages within the Backlog and Doing columns. Without stages, the Flow Board has simple columns. With stages, each column gets named sub-columns — Backlog might have "Ideas" and "Ready"; Doing might have "In Progress" and "Review". Once enabled, Stages appears in the Settings menu, where you define them.

• Show Budget Fields adds budget tracking to projects and milestones — hourly cost and burn visibility.

Exclude Weekends From Durations affects Timeline calculations. When enabled, a task that spans Monday through the following Monday counts as 5 working days, not 7 calendar days.

The Time Entry Filtering section controls which tasks your users see when they select a Project Manager task while creating a time entry. The Lookahead limits visibility to tasks due within a window (7, 30, or 60 days — or all items). The hide toggles remove tasks that have incomplete dependencies, fall beyond the current milestone cycle, or don't match the user's capacity types. These filters reduce noise for teams with large backlogs — users only see what is relevant to them right now.

Set Up Billing

The Billing tab has three sections: Invoice Details, Invoice Options, and Billing Address. To get an invoice out, set your Company Name, an Invoice Prefix and Invoice Seed #, the Default Currency Symbol, and your Tax Rate (%) under Invoice Details, then fill in your billing address and save. Every field is described on Billing Settings.

Exports

The Exports tab is where you download organization data. Download Audit Log produces a CSV file of all time entry audit logs for the Time Period you pick — the past 1, 2, or 3 months. Export Data, a full export of time entries, projects, clients, and users, is marked Coming Soon. See Exports for details.

What Happens Next

These settings cascade. Enabling Capacity Planning means the Assembling Your Team guide can assign capacity types to users. Enabling Billing means Setting Up Your First Project can assign clients and billable categories. Enabling Stages means that project will have a Flow Board with sub-stage columns.