Toggl's AI will now log your time for you. That is the one thing a timesheet must not do.

Toggl's help page for its new AI chat has a section called "Get things done from the chat." The first item on its list is "Log time for you." Toggl is careful about how that works. Everything the chat does "runs with your own permissions," and Toggl's AI page promises "no time logging without permission." This isn't surveillance, and this post doesn't say it is. The problem is a different one. A timesheet is a person's own account of what they worked on and for how long. Once software writes the entry, the person is approving the software's version instead of giving their own. This post covers what Toggl's pages say the chat and the desktop app now do, what Toggl says about mistakes, whether you can tell afterward who wrote an entry, and five questions to ask any tool before you bill from it.

What Toggl 2.0 does now

In September Toggl announced "time intelligence" and Toggl AI. Toggl AI is a chat built into the Toggl web app, and for now it is only there. The help page says "The chat can act on your workspace, not just answer questions." The AI page puts it as "Ask Toggl AI to log time, create projects, tasks and tags, or change workspace settings." The chat carries a beta label.

The chat isn't the only new way for an entry to start somewhere other than the person's memory. Toggl's page on time tracking in Toggl 2.0 lists these for the desktop app, under "Ways to log time":

• "The app detects which apps and websites you're using and suggests time logs automatically."
• "You can also mark a scheduled time block as done in My Time to auto-track it, or do this for an entire day at once."
• "The desktop app surfaces suggestions based on your recent activity, so recurring work can be logged with a single click."

The AI page adds that "Toggl learns each person's tracking patterns and suggests time logs for the work they do regularly." Each of these starts with the person: a request typed to the chat, a suggestion clicked, a block marked done. Toggl says its AI "can never be used to monitor employees in any way or log time without explicit permission." We take that at its word. Permission isn't the question. Authorship is.

What a timesheet is for

A timesheet is the one record in a business that rests on somebody's word. A client pays for forty hours because a person said they worked forty hours. Payroll pays the same way. When an hour is questioned, the answer that settles it is "I wrote that down when I did it."

An entry the software drafted and a person accepted is a different record. It says what the software inferred, less whatever the person caught. Accepting a draft takes less attention than writing one. Marking "an entire day at once" as done takes less still.

Toggl says as much about the chat: "Like any AI tool, the chat can occasionally get something wrong." Its advice is "For business-critical numbers, you can always cross-check your data in Reports." That works for the chat's answers, which Toggl says "are calculated from your workspace's actual reporting data." It doesn't work for an entry. Reports adds up the entries, the wrong one included. The only thing an hour can be checked against is the memory of the person who worked it, and a draft makes that step easy to skip. If you bill by the hour, every entry is a business-critical number.

Can you tell later which entries a person wrote?

Ask Toggl before you rely on any of this, because its pages don't say. The chat runs with your own permissions. Toggl's audit log page says "Only changes made by someone other than the entry owner are recorded," and gives the example "when an admin corrects a team member's time log." The audit log is "available on Premium and Enterprise plans."

Toggl's AI help page, its time tracking page and its audit log page don't say whether a time log the chat creates is marked as the chat's, or whether an accepted suggestion is marked as accepted. If neither is, nothing in the record separates an hour someone wrote down from an hour someone waved through. A year later, when a client asks about a line on an invoice, that's the difference you'd want to be able to show.

Toggl does give admins a switch. "AI features are enabled by default," the help page says, and turning the setting off "disables the Toggl AI chat for everyone in the organization," with the block enforced on Toggl's servers. A firm that doesn't want the chat logging time has to switch it off. It doesn't start off.

Where Winnows stands

Winnows has no AI features. Nothing summarizes your notes or guesses your hours. The timer is a stopwatch you start and stop, and entries are numbers you type. There's nothing to switch off.

So every entry is one a person timed or typed. If you use approvals, weeks are submitted and approved, and the manager signs off on what the person entered, not on what software suggested to them. A payroll lock date keeps closed periods closed. The no-monitoring post covers what else we leave out, and invoicing from your books covers what happens to approved hours next.