FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What ActivityPulse captures and what it never captures, how teams adopt it, how it handles offline work and multiple devices, what it costs, and where it stops. If a question here has a hedged answer, that is because the honest answer is hedged.

Questions

Does ActivityPulse log keystrokes or record the screen?

No. Keystroke content is never captured — there is no code path that records what a person types — and there is no screen recording or session replay by default. Screenshots exist as an Enterprise capability that is off unless an administrator deliberately enables it. What is captured by default is which application and window were in the foreground, and for how long.

Will our engineering team accept being tracked?

That is the constraint the product is designed around rather than an afterthought. The desktop agent shows the person what is being captured on their own machine and offers a pause control for personal time. Nothing reads their keystrokes or their screen, and no productivity score is calculated for them. Teams reject tools that watch them; they tolerate tools that count hours honestly.

Is ActivityPulse GDPR compliant?

Compliance is a property of a deployment — your lawful basis, your works council agreement, your retention policy — not something a vendor can hand you in a box. What ActivityPulse provides is a design that makes a compliant deployment achievable: minimisation by default, sensitive capture off unless enabled, a narrower scope that can never widen a broader one, an audit trail of configuration changes, and erasure that removes the captured activity and the raw archive behind it.

Will a works council approve it?

That decision is theirs, and it depends on your agreement with them. The questions they usually ask have concrete answers: no keystroke content, no screen recording by default, the monitored person can see what is collected and pause it, capture can be limited to a working-time window, and no individual is given a productivity score.

What happens when someone works offline or on a plane?

Capture continues. Segments queue in a local outbox on the device and sync when the connection returns. Each segment carries a UUIDv7 that the server upserts on, so a retried or delayed sync stores the time once — no lost hours, and no hour counted twice.

Does ActivityPulse give people a productivity score?

No, and that is deliberate. Producing a headline productivity score is an explicit non-goal, and the dashboard is built not to compute one. The product reports what happened — hours attributed to projects, idle time subtracted, which applications the time was spent in — and leaves the judgement to a human who has context the software does not.

How long does it take to roll out?

The agent is a small download for Windows or macOS and capture starts once it is signed in, without calendar integration or project tagging to configure first. The part that takes real time is not technical: it is agreeing internally, and with a works council where you have one, what will be captured and why.

Can hours be corrected before invoicing?

Yes. Manual timesheet adjustments are supported, clearly marked as adjustments and audited. Captured data is never silently overwritten, so the original record survives alongside the correction and a reviewer can see both.

What stops one client's data being visible to another?

Each organisation's captured activity is stored in its own database, so isolation is structural rather than a filter applied at query time. Within an organisation, reads are scoped by role: a member sees only their own activity, a team admin only their team's subtree.

Which operating systems does the agent support?

Windows and macOS. There is no Linux client and no mobile client, and neither is on the current roadmap. A browser extension acts as a companion to the desktop agent rather than a replacement for it.

What happens if someone works on two machines?

They are credited with one hour, not two. Overlapping time from two devices belonging to the same person is resolved before it reaches a report, and the raw per-device figures are kept alongside the credited ones so the resolution can be inspected rather than taken on trust.

Can we see what an individual is doing right now?

No. ActivityPulse is not a live monitoring or remote-control product. It reports attributed time over a period, scoped to what the viewer's role permits, and there is no live screen view or remote session capability.

See where the hours actually went

Free for up to three people. Windows and macOS. No screenshots, no keystroke logging.