1. Before You Start: Provisioning
Orca Time is licensed per organisation, and sign-up is not open to the public. Your email address must be provisioned by the publisher before you can create an account. If it has not been provisioned yet, email chris@simmance.ai with your company name and the email address you want to use as the admin account.
Once provisioned, you can sign up straight away. Your team can install the app at any time, but they can only sign in once their seats are confirmed, so provisioning yourself first is the sensible order.
2. Sign Up and Create Your Organisation
Go to time.simmance.ai and sign up with your provisioned email address. Your organisation is created automatically as part of sign-up, so there is no separate setup step. You are its first admin.
3. Invite Your Team
Team members join by invite link. Share the link from the dashboard and each person signs up under your organisation, then downloads and installs the Mac app. Point them at the team member guide, which covers installation and the two macOS permission prompts.
Your licence includes a fixed seat allowance. Invites are capped by it: when every seat is taken, new sign-ups through the invite link are refused until a seat is freed or the allowance is increased. To add seats, email chris@simmance.ai.
4. Organisation Settings: Granular or Holistic
The most important organisation setting is how much detail admins can see about the team's tracked time. Each person always sees their own data in full, whichever mode you choose. The setting controls the admin view only:
- Granular: admins can see window titles in the team view. Useful where clients are billed on evidenced detail.
- Holistic: admins see rollups only, with no window titles or URLs. You still get durations by person, app, client, and category, but not what was in anyone's window.
Choose the mode that matches what you have agreed with your team, and tell them which one is on. The privacy guide explains the full who-sees-what picture, including what the platform operator can and cannot see.
5. Clients and Attribution Rules
Create clients in the dashboard, then add attribution rules that assign tracked time to them automatically. A rule is a pattern match (a regular expression) against any of:
- The window title
- The URL of the active browser tab
- The domain of the active browser tab
- The application name
For example, a rule matching your client's domain in the tab URL, or their name in document titles, will collect that time under the client without anyone having to remember to tag it. Rules apply retrospectively: when you add or change one, existing tracked time is re-attributed to match, so you can refine your rules after the fact without losing history.
6. Billing and CSV Export
The dashboard's team view rolls time up by person, client, and period, and exports to CSV so you can drop it into invoicing or payroll. There is no payment mechanism inside the product: the licence is invoiced directly by the publisher. See the reports guide for the export details and the personal reports your team can generate themselves.
More Orca Time Guides
- Getting started for team members
- What Orca Time records, and your controls
- Reports
- Download Orca Time
- About Orca Time, the product page
- Legal: privacy notice, data processing agreement, information security, licence agreement
Questions: chris@simmance.ai