When I was a dev manager, our company policy required developers to track their time against Jira issues. It’s really tough to motivate people to track time.

What ended up happening is that we would hit the end of the quarter, and our CIO wanted time tracking for capitalization and maybe 20% of the team had entered their time. They would literally have to spend a half-day going back and trying to back-fill their time.

This happens a lot – no one likes time tracking. It’s really easy to fall behind and the further away you get from the work, the less accurate it’s going to be. Especially for consultants who bill, if they are forced to enter their time right after they do the work, it’s going to be a hell of a lot more accurate than if they have to enter it several weeks later.