Can you track time in Salesforce?

Salesforce doesn’t include full time tracking out of the box, but there are three practical ways to do it: build it yourself with custom objects and fields, bolt on a dedicated time-tracking app, or use a PSA platform that has time capture built in. Which one fits depends on how much billable-hour accuracy your business actually depends on.

Option 1: Custom objects and fields

For light needs, a Salesforce admin can create a custom “time entry” object related to projects, tasks, or cases, with fields for hours, date, billable flag, and user. It’s free and flexible, but it’s also manual — someone builds and maintains it, and consultants still have to remember to log entries. It works for simple cases and breaks down as volume and reporting needs grow.

Option 2: A dedicated time-tracking app

The AppExchange has standalone time apps that layer onto Salesforce. They’re quicker to deploy than a custom build, but they often track time in isolation from your projects and billing, which recreates the fragmentation that causes time to slip in the first place.

Option 3: PSA with time capture built in

The most complete option is a professional services automation platform where time tracking is part of the same system as your projects, resourcing, and billing. Time entered against a task flows straight into project actuals and invoicing, with billable and non-billable clearly separated. Because capture happens inside the daily workflow rather than as a separate end-of-week chore, accuracy goes up and revenue leakage goes down.

Making time capture actually happen

Whatever the mechanism, the hard part isn’t storing time — it’s getting people to log it accurately, in the moment. The most reliable setups reduce friction: quick entry, sensible defaults, and suggestions based on calendar and project activity, so consultants confirm their time rather than reconstruct it days later. That’s the difference between a timesheet that’s technically submitted and one that’s actually right.

Cloud Coach captures time natively on Salesforce as part of project delivery, so billable hours are recorded where the work happens.