The problem is not visibility. It is the record.
Most business owners who go looking for time tracking software think they have a visibility problem. They do not, usually. What they have is a record problem, and it shows up at the end of the month.
The spreadsheet says 162 hours. Your assistant remembers working through a public holiday. Nobody wrote down which of those hours were the client project and which were admin. The exchange rate moved four cents between agreeing the rate and sending the money, and neither of you is quite sure what the number should have been. So you settle it by feel, and both of you privately think you came off worse.
Screenshot software does not fix any of that. It answers a question you were not really asking, at a cost to the relationship you do not see until someone resigns.
What is actually worth recording
Five things. Anything beyond this is usually the vendor selling you a feature rather than solving your problem.
- Start, end, and breaks. With unpaid break time subtracted from the payable total automatically, so the number you pay from is the number you owe.
- A department or client.Chosen at clock-in, not reconstructed at month end. This is what lets you answer “how many hours went to that account?” without archaeology.
- What they were working on.In the assistant's own words, editable during the shift. It takes them four seconds and saves the weekly status call.
- The exceptions. Missed clock-outs, shifts still open, hours that were edited after the fact. You should be reviewing four flagged rows, not forty clean ones.
- What the pay was based on. The rate, the hours, the conversion, and the resulting total, saved as it was at the time — not recalculated later from whatever the settings say today.
Getting timezones right
If your assistant is in Manila and you are in Vancouver, you are fifteen hours apart. Their Monday morning is your Sunday afternoon. Handled badly, this produces a pay period that includes a shift twice, or not at all.
The rule is simple: store every timestamp in UTC, and convert to local time only when it is displayed. Your assistant sees their shifts in their day; you see the same shifts in yours. ClockBase does this throughout — there is no “company timezone” setting that quietly misfiles someone's Friday night.
The decision that still needs a human is which calendar the pay week follows. Pick one, write it down, and tell your assistant. It takes a minute now and prevents an argument later.
From hours to actually paying someone
This is where most time tracking tools stop and hand you a CSV. It is also the part that takes your Monday.
The complication is that three different currencies are usually in play, and conflating them is how people get shortchanged. There is the currency you agreed the rate in — often USD, because that is the number everyone negotiates in. There is the currency your assistant is actually paid in, which is the one that matters to them. And there is the currency of the account you send the money from.
ClockBase keeps those three as separate settings, and the conversion between the agreed rate and the payout is an explicit rate recorded against that pay period — not whatever the market happened to be doing at the moment you clicked send. If a rate is missing, the export stops rather than guessing. A payroll tool that guesses at an exchange rate is a payroll tool that pays someone the wrong amount.
From there the period produces a paystub the assistant can see for themselves, and payouts go out as one batch so everyone on the same run gets the same rate.
What this approach does not give you
It does not give you proof. If you clock in and go back to bed, ClockBase records a shift, and no flag will catch it. Nothing here substitutes for knowing whether the work is arriving.
What it does is make that a management conversation rather than a software feature — and remove every other excuse for a pay dispute, which is the part software is genuinely good at.
Common questions
- How do I track a virtual assistant's hours without spying on them?
- Record the shift rather than the screen: when work started and ended, which breaks were taken, which department or client the time belongs to, and what the assistant was working on in their own words. That produces everything you need to pay correctly and to review a disputed timesheet, without screen capture or activity scoring.
- How do timezones work if my assistant is twelve hours ahead?
- Store every timestamp in UTC and display it in the viewer's own timezone. Your assistant sees their day; you see yours; the underlying record is the same. The place this actually bites is the pay period boundary — a shift that starts Sunday evening for you starts Monday morning for them — so agree which calendar the pay week follows before the first run, not during it.
- Should I pay a virtual assistant hourly or a fixed monthly rate?
- Hourly suits variable workloads and makes overtime visible; a fixed monthly rate is simpler to budget and less to administer. Tracking time is worth doing either way — on a fixed rate it tells you whether the arrangement is still fair to both sides, which is usually the thing that quietly stops being true.
- What happens when an assistant forgets to clock out?
- It should be flagged, not paid. A tool that quietly runs the shift from the start time to the present will hand you an eighteen-hour day in the payroll total. In ClockBase the shift is surfaced as an exception, an administrator corrects the end time with a reason, and the shift stays marked as edited in the record.
- Do I need to track time if I trust my assistant?
- Tracking is not a trust test — it is a record. It answers how many hours a client was billed for, whether someone quietly worked three weekends, and what the paystub was based on if anyone ever asks. Those questions arrive months later, when nobody remembers.