How to track time in Slack: 3 methods compared (2026)

Slack has no built-in timesheet. There is no timer to start, no hours report to pull, and /remind will nag you but never add anything up. So "tracking time in Slack" really means one of three workflows layered on top of it: a start-stop timer app, a reminder plus a spreadsheet, or a bot that asks everyone once a day how the hours went. This page compares the three honestly, including the cases where the right answer is a dedicated time tracking tool and not us.

Full disclosure: we make asyncmate, which does the third method. If you bill clients by the minute, method one is better for you and we say so below.

Method 1: a start-stop timer connected to Slack

The standard picks here are Toggl Track, Harvest and Clockify. Toggl Track and Harvest have official Slack integrations: you type a slash command or press a button when you start a task, another when you stop, and the tool keeps a precise record of every interval. Clockify has no native Slack app at all, only a browser extension and Zapier recipes; we untangle that in the Clockify Slack integration guide. Either way, reports come out to the minute, tagged by project and client.

This is the right method when the minutes are money. An agency invoicing by the hour, a lawyer, a freelancer with three clients: they need interval-level accuracy and an audit trail, and a timer is the only method that provides it.

The failure mode is human, not technical. Timers depend on people remembering to press the button, twice, every time they switch tasks. Everyone forgets. Then they reconstruct the day from memory anyway, which is exactly the manual work the timer was supposed to remove, except now it happens inside an editing screen with a guilty red gap in it. A forgotten timer that ran overnight has never made a timesheet more accurate.

• Best for: billable work where invoices need minute-level detail.
• Cost: free tiers exist; paid plans typically $5 to $12 per user per month.
• Weak spot: relies on everyone starting and stopping the timer, all day, forever.

Method 2: Slack reminders plus a spreadsheet

The zero-budget version. Set a recurring Slack reminder in the channel:

/remind #team "Log your hours for today in the timesheet: [sheet link]" at 4:30pm every weekday

Everyone opens the shared spreadsheet and fills in their row. It costs nothing, it needs no approvals, and for a team of two or three it genuinely works.

The costs show up as the team grows. Someone has to build and maintain the sheet, add rows for new weeks, and chase the people who ignored the reminder, and Slack cannot tell you who those people are. Sums and per-project breakdowns are formulas someone owns. By the time five or six people are involved, the "free" method is quietly consuming an hour or two of someone's week, and the data is only as complete as the most diligent person's patience.

• Best for: very small teams with no budget and simple needs.
• Cost: free, plus the admin time of whoever owns the sheet.
• Weak spot: no structure, no chasing, and accuracy decays as the team grows.

Method 3: a daily time log in Slack

The third method drops the timer entirely. Once a day, at the end of the working day, a bot sends each person a direct message listing their projects. They type the hours against each one, in about ten seconds, and they are done. The bot adds everything up, chases whoever has not answered, and gives whoever runs the team a report by person and by project.

The accuracy trade is explicit: you get hours per project per day, not intervals per task. "5 hours on the redesign, 3 on internal tooling" instead of "9:14 to 10:37 on ticket 482". For invoicing by the minute that is not enough. For knowing where the team's week went, it is exactly enough, and it costs each person ten seconds instead of a day of button pressing.

It also survives human nature better than a timer, because there is nothing to forget mid-task. The prompt comes to you, in Slack, which you already have open. Answering is the path of least resistance instead of a habit to maintain.

• Best for: small product teams and agencies that need project allocation, not billable minutes.
• Cost: typically bundled with a standup bot; asyncmate includes it on the free plan.
• Weak spot: end-of-day recall gives you honest halves and quarters of hours, not minutes.

The three methods side by side

Which method should you choose?

You invoice clients for every hour. Take a timer: Toggl Track or Harvest, connected to Slack. You need interval accuracy and none of the other methods can fake it.

You need timesheets for payroll or compliance. Take a full timesheet product with approvals and locked periods. That is a workflow requirement, not a Slack problem.

You are a small product team or agency that needs to know where the week went. Take the daily log. The per-project totals are what you actually look at, and it is the only method the whole team will still be doing in month three.

You just want a countdown or Pomodoro timer in Slack. That is a different product category entirely, and we wrote a separate guide to Slack timers, countdowns and Pomodoro. The short version: /remind me in 25 minutes covers the basics, and asyncmate is not a countdown timer and would be the wrong tool.

How asyncmate does the daily log

asyncmate's time tracking in Slack is method three, built out. You define the projects and assign them to everyone, to everyone except a few people, or to a fixed list. Then the prompt arrives as a DM at the end of each person's working day, in their own time zone, listing only the projects they are assigned to:

Copy

asyncmateAPP5:00 PM

Log your hours for Thu, Aug 6

Acme redesign: 5 / 6 h

Internal tooling: 3 / 2 h

Today: 8 h / 8 h

Each person can carry a daily target, and the review screens show overtime and shortfall against it, so a fifty-two hour week is visible without anyone adding up a column. The dashboard has three views: Review, with totals by person or by project and the people-by-projects grid; Calendar, a day-by-day picture of who logged what; and Export, a CSV for payroll or client invoicing. The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the Log hours guide.

Hours logging runs on the free plan, which covers the first 10 people who answer, and during the beta everything is free until November 1, 2026. There is no rate card, no invoice generation and no accounting integration. If you need those, you need a professional services tool, and you should buy one.

FAQ

Does Slack have a built-in time tracker? No. Slack has reminders and scheduled messages, but nothing that records or totals hours. All time tracking in Slack comes from a connected app or a workflow you build yourself.

How do I track hours in Slack? Pick one of the three methods above: connect a timer app like Toggl Track or Clockify, post a recurring /remind that points at a shared spreadsheet, or use a bot like asyncmate that asks each person for their hours once a day and totals them by project.

What is the best Slack timer? For work timers, Toggl Track and Harvest have the most established Slack integrations. If you mean a countdown or Pomodoro timer, that is a different category: our Slack timer guide compares the native options and the apps that still work.

Does Clockify integrate with Slack? Not natively; our Clockify Slack integration guide covers what exists instead. Clockify connects to Slack through Zapier or similar connectors, while Toggl Track and Harvest ship official Slack apps. If starting and stopping timers from inside Slack is the point, pick a tool with a native integration, or skip the timer entirely and use a daily log that lives in Slack.

Can Slack export timesheets? Not by itself. The export comes from whichever tool holds the data: a timer app's reports, your own spreadsheet, or a CSV from a logging bot. asyncmate exports hours as a CSV for any date range from the Hours section.

Is daily logging accurate enough? For invoicing by the minute, no; use a timer. For payroll at the "who worked how much on what" level and for project allocation, yes, and in practice a log people actually fill in daily beats a timer people forget to start.