Why we rebuilt our time tracker

Every studio has the same argument once a quarter: did that project make money? The answer lives in three places — hours, cost rates, and what you actually invoiced — and in most tools it takes an afternoon and a spreadsheet to put them together.

That’s the problem Diurna starts from. Not the timer. The timer is easy.

What we kept

The week grid. It sounds trivial, but the difference between a timesheet people fill in and one they don’t is whether you can enter a week the way you remember it: a row per project, a column per day, tab across, done. Everything else in a time tracker is downstream of whether the data actually gets entered.

We also kept budgets in the form studios actually agree to them — hours or fees, on the whole project or per task or per person, sometimes resetting monthly. Getting this wrong means your over-budget warning fires on the wrong day, which means people stop trusting it.

What we dropped

Integrations directories. Payment collection. A mobile app. Each is real work, and none of them changes the quarterly argument. Invoices leave as a Xero CSV because that’s where they were always going anyway.

What we added

An MCP server. Rather than bolting a chat box onto a reports page, Diurna exposes its data through the Model Context Protocol, so the assistant you already use can query it — hours by project, what’s still uninvoiced, profitability for a period. It runs locally today; the hosted version is being built alongside the multi-studio release.

More on that when there’s an address to give you.