As businesses grow, understanding how engineering teams allocate their time becomes critical for efficiency and financial transparency. For decades, that meant adding processes like time sheets, labels, and tags. Now, as things have gotten more complicated, businesses have added a whole new process in the form of enterprise project management systems. The traditional rationale goes: by inputting their work, there will be more transparency for managers and simplified tax compliance for controllers and Heads of Tax.

But that ignores a fundamental problem: these additional layers aren't connected to the actual core work engineers do. They depend on people following a process consistently — which never quite works. The result is incomplete and inaccurate data across systems, and frustration in engineering and finance. 

Engineers didn’t sign up to bookkeep. The burden of accurately tagging and tracking their work is a headache that’s out of sync with the rest of their workflow.

So, we created a better solution with Neo.Tax: an automated solution that calculates your engineering team’s time — with accuracy and consistency — from existing systems. Remove the burden from engineering and remove human error from your datasets.

The Old Way:

Picture it: An engineer is in the flow, solving a critical bug, when a reminder pops up—it’s time to log hours. They pause their work, switch tabs, and start piecing together their tasks. Did that last hour go under 'feature development' or 'bug fixes'? Was it related to 'backend optimization' or a 'client issue'? They comb through their work history, trying to recall every detail. Wait, what’s the definition of the R&D credit again? What's capitalizable?  

By now, a quick task has become a frustrating ordeal of dropdown menus, tags, and guesswork. By the time they’re done and back to their code, the momentum is gone.

This is the reality of time tracking with traditional tools—disruptive, tedious, and out of sync with how engineers actually work.

And that’s only the beginning of the problem.

In order to get usable data, every new engineering hire must be trained on a company’s tracking system. As any engineer can tell you, each company does it a little different. Then, a manager must ensure that the system is being followed, sending followups to engineers and auditing inputted data to try to find errors as they’re being introduced. Months later, when accounting goes to review and finds a whole team's work is missing from the PMO system? That means a call to the engineering team who will try to parse Jira data and try to give accounting their best guess because they certainly don’t remember it now. That’s hours of tedious work for both finance and engineering. And the net result? Inaccurate data, lost productivity,  and frustration on both sides. 

But putting feelings aside, the biggest issue is that this extra work is unrelated to the central goal of creating innovative solutions. Why divert your engineers’ attention to a different system that has nothing to do with what they’re working on? And why make it a manager’s job to chase down virtual timesheets instead of leading the team?

As anyone who’s worked at a company that uses Tempo, Harvest, Clarity PPM, Project Online, or any other PMO can tell you, despite the effort, the results are inconsistent. Everyone inputs hours differently, some people forget to put in hours at all and, inevitably, clean up is required.

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The Neo.Tax Way:

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Why waste the time? Why not use the data you already have in Jira and GitHub to automate the process?

At Neo.Tax, we asked the same question—and built an AI-powered solution to answer it.

Neo.Tax automatically calculates effort from existing engineering metadata and creates a record of hours spent on specific tasks. That means, come tax time, we’ve already sorted your internal metadata into qualified and unqualified R&D spend—no spreadsheets, no guesswork, and no wasted time. 

What used to take hundreds of hours happens automatically.

So, switch to Neo.Tax. I promise: your engineers will thank you.