My company and I have been using ClickUp for the past few months, and overall we love the flexibility and systems it provides. However, one major pain point for our workflow is the inability to track active time entries in real time.

A large portion of our work involves ad hoc requests, troubleshooting, and investigations. Currently, the only way to see how much time a user has spent on a task is after they stop the timer and finalize the time entry. This creates a challenge because many of our tasks are time-boxed to a specific number of billable hours.

As I’m sure many people can relate to, when you’re deep into debugging or resolving an issue, it’s very easy to lose track of time. This can create real business impacts for teams that work under contracts or fixed-hour agreements. For example, if a client only approves a certain number of billable hours for a task and we exceed that limit without realizing it, we often have to absorb those extra costs ourselves because we were unable to notify the client in time.

What would be incredibly valuable is a way to monitor tracked time while the timer is still running and trigger automations based on progress toward the task’s time estimate.

For example:

* A configurable automation that triggers when a technician reaches 90–95% of the estimated time for a task

* An in-task warning, notification, or tag indicating they are approaching the time limit

* Optional reminders prompting the technician to document notes, update the client, or request approval before exceeding the allocated hours

I found a request from 2024 mentioning automations based on “time worked vs. time estimate,” but that does not fully solve the issue if the work is completed in a single continuous time-tracking session. The key missing piece is visibility and automation tied to active running timers, not finalized entries.

I imagine we are far from the only team that would benefit from this feature, especially for MSPs, consulting teams, contractors, and technical support organizations that rely heavily on time-boxed work and billable-hour tracking.

If there is already a way to accomplish this, I would genuinely love to learn about it. I’ve searched through ClickUp Brain and current documentation but have not found a solution that supports real-time monitoring of active tracked time.