When the keyboard and mouse have been untouched for a while, the Ruwad Connect tracker asks the person what happened and offers to leave that time out of the entry. The exclusion is recorded on the server against the time entry, so approvals, payroll and invoices all read the same corrected hours.
The short answer. The rest of the page explains it.What "idle" means
The tracker watches for keyboard and mouse input while the timer runs. It does not record what was typed; it counts whether anything was. When no input has arrived for the workspace's idle threshold, the session is idle.
The prompt
When the person returns, the tracker asks what happened and shows how long the machine was untouched. They can:
- Keep the time, because they were working away from the keyboard: reading, a call, a whiteboard.
- Leave it out, in which case the idle span is excluded from the entry.
The choice is the person's, in front of them, at the moment it happens. A manager reviewing the timesheet later sees the entry with its excluded span marked.
Why the exclusion lives on the server
A tracker that only trims the clock on screen would leave the server's record of the entry untouched, and the payroll run would pay for the idle minutes anyway. In Ruwad Connect the desktop sends the exclusion to the server, which records it in the entry's pause history with the reason idle. Everything downstream reads the entry net of its pauses:
- the Timesheets page and the approval a manager gives,
- the task's actual hours and the project's budget, updated when the entry is approved,
- payroll, computed from approved hours at the member's rate,
- invoices, generated from approved billable hours at the project's rate,
- every export.
One correction, one record, every figure agrees.
Breaks are not idle
A break is a button. It pauses the timer deliberately and is recorded on the entry as a break, not as idle time. Nothing is captured during a break.
Heartbeat loss
While tracking, the desktop sends a heartbeat to the server. If the heartbeat stops (the laptop sleeps, the network drops), tracking pauses on its own and the gap is not counted. When the connection returns, the person punches in again.