Appearance
Effort tracking
Effort tracking is how Flowstate knows what people actually worked on, week by week. Allocations are the plan. Effort is the truth. The gap between them is where most of the interesting financial questions live — was that quarter spent on what we said it would be?
You capture effort one of three ways: pulled from your PMS, entered by employees themselves, or signed off by a manager on behalf of a team. All three feed the same weekly grid.
The weekly grid
Effort is stored at week granularity. Each week, each person submits a row of percentages — what fraction of their time went to which projects. The numbers must sum to 100. The grid is the same shape whether the source is a PMS sync, a self-submission, or a manager filling it in.
Weeks have a status:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
not_submitted | Nobody has filed this week's effort yet |
submitted | Effort entered, awaiting approval |
pending_approval | Sat in an approval stage, manager action needed |
approved | Signed off |
rejected | Sent back for changes |
overdue | Past the due date with no submission |
The five views
Overview
/effort-tracking — the top-down view. Recent weeks listed newest first, each one showing how many teams have submitted, how many are overdue, who needs to act. Filter by "Needs My Action" to cut to the rows where you are the approver.
My Teams
/effort-tracking/my-teams — the manager view. The teams you are responsible for, with each member's current week status and a one-click path to review or remind.
All Teams
/effort-tracking/all-teams — the same shape as My Teams, scoped to the full org. For finance, ops or admins.
Ticket Review
/effort-tracking/ticket-review — the orphan ticket queue. Work items synced from your PMS that are not linked to any Flowstate project. Bulk-link them, or kick them back to the assignee to tag the right project.
Contractors
/effort-tracking/contractors — split-panel layout with companies on the left, contractor timesheets on the right. Gated by the effort_contractor_view permission since contractor rates are sensitive.
How PMS sync works
If a PMS integration is wired up, Flowstate pulls completed work items each night and matches them to projects via the externalId link. The percentages on the weekly grid are pre-filled from the time spent on those tickets, so submitters validate rather than guess.
Tickets that cannot be matched land in the orphan queue. The match runs again every sync cycle, so once you fix the project link upstream, the ticket disappears from the queue automatically.
TIP
PMS sync gives you a baseline. Submitters can override it — if someone spent two days helping another team but billed the time to their own project's ticket, they can move that 40% manually before submitting.
Approvals
Each team has zero or more approval stages — typically the engineering manager, sometimes a finance reviewer for high-cost teams. Submitted effort moves through stages in order. A reject sends it back to the submitter with a note. An approve at the final stage marks the week approved and locks the data.
Approved effort is what shows up in the analytics and finance variance views. Unapproved data is excluded — you do not want a half-baked week skewing a quarterly report.
What the data is used for
- Variance reporting — actual effort vs allocated effort, project by project.
- CapEx / R&D claims — auditable record of who worked on what, signed off by a manager. See Cost Capitalisation and R&D Tax.
- Project cost actuals — replaces forecast costs with what really happened, for completed periods.
Where to go next
- Allocations — the forecast side. Effort tracking is the actuals side.
- Effort API — read endpoints for project and team effort.
- Cost capitalisation — how approved effort feeds CapEx workflows.
- PMS integrations — Azure DevOps, Jira, Linear, Asana.