1. Join Your Organisation
Your admin will send you an invite link. Open it and sign up: your account is created inside your organisation automatically. If the link refuses your sign-up, the organisation's seat allowance is full, and your admin needs to free a seat or add more before you can join.
2. Download and Install the App
Download OrcaTime-latest.dmg (or see the install page), open it, and drag Orca Time into Applications. The app is Developer ID signed and notarised by Apple, so macOS opens it without ceremony. Open it and sign in with the account you created from your invite link. You can install before your seat is confirmed, but you can only sign in once it is.
Installing on Windows (beta)
Orca Time for Windows is in beta. Download OrcaTime-Setup-latest.exe and run it. Because the beta build is not yet signed with a Microsoft-recognised certificate, Windows shows a blue Windows protected your PC screen the first time you run the installer. Nothing is wrong with the file:
- Run the installer. The blue Windows protected your PC screen appears.
- Click More info, the small link in the message text.
- Click Run anyway, and the installer runs as normal.
The download is served over HTTPS from our own domain, and every update is cryptographically verified by the app. Once installed, everything mirrors the Mac app: you sign in with the same account from your invite link, consent to tracking in the same way, and the app lives in the system tray rather than the menu bar. Browser tab capture works on Chrome and Edge; on Firefox the app falls back to the window title.
3. The Two Permission Prompts
On first run, macOS asks you to grant two kinds of permission. Each one exists for a single, specific reason:
- Accessibility. This is how Orca Time reads the title of the window you are working in. Without it, the app can only see which application is frontmost, not which document, email, or page. It is never used to read the content of the window, and the app cannot capture keystrokes or screenshots.
- Automation, one prompt per browser. This is how Orca Time asks your browser which tab is active, so browser time can be attributed to a site or client rather than just to the browser as a whole. macOS raises a separate prompt for each browser you use (Safari, Chrome, and so on), which is why you may see it more than once. It reads the active tab's URL only, never the page content.
If you decline either permission the app still runs, but tracking is correspondingly coarser: no window titles without Accessibility, and no tab URLs without Automation.
4. The Menu Bar
Orca Time lives in the menu bar. Click it at any moment to see exactly what is being recorded right now: the current app, window title, and tab, plus your running total for the day. There is nothing recorded that the menu bar does not show you.
5. Your Profile
In the dashboard at time.simmance.ai, fill in your profile: your name, role, and team. Admins use these to make sense of the team view and reports, so it is worth doing before your first week of tracked time.
6. Pause
Pause tracking from the menu bar whenever you want. Pausing hides what you did, never how long: the paused period appears in your timeline as a labelled duration with no titles, URLs, or app names attached. Nobody, including you, gets a mystery gap, and nobody gets the detail either. The privacy guide covers this model in full, along with blocklists and your other controls.
More Orca Time Guides
- Getting started for admins
- 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