Time Tracking Lock & Soft Close

Use Time Tracking settings when payroll, invoicing or client reporting depends on logged hours not changing after a period closes. The page holds three independent controls:

Think of Lock as the accountant closing the month: once the books are shut, nothing moves. Soft Close is a highlighter instead of a padlock: hours logged after the deadline still count, but everyone can see they came in late.

Where to find it

Configure Settings → Admin → Time Tracking. The page needs the Configure Time Tracking permission (MANAGE_LOCK_SETTINGS), held by the default Owner and Admin roles. It is available to every organization; no plugin is required, though the Weekly Logs plugin respects the same lock. Every control saves as you change it; there is no Save button.

Allow Parent Item Time Entries

The General section holds this one switch.

• On (default) — time can be logged on any item at any level, as described in Time Spent.
• Off — new time can only be logged against items whose type has no child types (Stories, Tasks, Defects…). On a parent item the New Entry button in the Time Tracking tab and in the Time Entries modal is disabled with an explanation, and workstreams are refused too. The API and MCP tools get a "leaf work items only" refusal.

Turning it off asks for confirmation and takes effect immediately, but is not retroactive: entries already on parent items stay viewable, editable and deletable; only moving an existing entry onto a different parent item is refused. "Parent" is a property of the item's type, not of its current children: an Epic with no children yet still counts as a parent, and a Story stays a leaf however deep it sits. The setting is also available through the API as PATCH /v1/organizations/{organizationId}/parent-time-entries-settings with { "allowParentTimeEntries": false }.

Work Week

Shared by Lock and Soft Close; it feeds their period boundaries and business-day grace counting.

• Work week start day — the day Weekly and Bi-weekly periods begin (default Monday). This is a one-time setting: changing it would re-label every historical period boundary, so it locks after the first save. The organization Owner can click Unlock beside it, confirm, and save a new value; doing so recomputes past Weekly and Bi-weekly periods (including both policies' Bi-weekly anchors) against the new day.
• Working days per week — how many days, starting from the start day, count as working days when a grace window is measured in business days: 4 to 6, default 5. Clear the field to return to the default.

Setting up Lock

1. Period type — how your accounting periods tile:
   • Weekly — seven days from the work week start day.
   • Bi-weekly — fixed, non-overlapping 14-day blocks. The first block is anchored when you activate Bi-weekly and the anchor never drifts.
   • Monthly — calendar months in your organization's timezone.
2. Grace period (days) — how long after a period ends its entries stay editable: 1 to 7 days.
3. Grace day type — Calendar days or Business days (counted with the Work Week settings above).
4. Click Enable Lock. The button activates once a period type is saved. Enforcement starts immediately and applies to every period, past ones included.

The Preview shows the Current period (or Closing period while one is in its grace window) and Entries lock on: the exact day, computed by the same engine that enforces the lock.

What locking looks like

• The time-entry date picker greys out locked dates; dates in their grace window are marked with a dot.
• Locked entries appear read-only in the entries table, with no edit or delete controls.
• Any write that reaches the server for a locked date is rejected with a message naming the day the period locked. There is no admin bypass.
• Running timers are exempt: a timer started before a period closed can still be stopped and edited, because an entry has no lockable date until it has an end.
• Deleting a work item still removes its time entries, locked or not. Lock protects entries from editing, not items from lifecycle operations.

Changing Lock later

Nothing is stamped onto entries. Changing the period type or grace window recalculates every period's status immediately under the new configuration, and clicking Disable Lock makes every previously locked entry editable again.

Setting up Soft Close

Soft Close has its own Period type, Grace period (days), Grace day type, Bi-weekly anchor, Enable Soft Close button and preview (Entries flag Late on:). It is independent of Lock: either can be on without the other.

How the Late flag behaves:

• Every change made after the grace window — a missed entry, a correction, a reassignment — is flagged Late. The entry's original date is never altered.
• Re-saving an entry without changing it does not count as Late.
• A Late entry stays fully editable. In the time entries table it shows a small clock marker beside its date with the tooltip "Entry added/updated late — you can still edit it".
• If Lock is also on, Lock wins: once a period locks, Soft Close ends for it too.
• If DevStride cannot determine a period's Soft Close status at the moment of a save, the save still goes through and the entry keeps whatever flag it had. Soft Close can never block time logging.

Unlike Lock, the Late flag is stamped on the entry, so changing or disabling Soft Close does not clear existing flags. A Late entry stays Late until it is next edited, when it is re-evaluated under the configuration in force at that moment.

Per-period grace overrides

A single period can be given its own grace window — extending just the December close, for example — without changing the default. Overrides are available through the API only, keyed by the period's start date:

• Lock: PATCH /v1/organizations/{organizationId}/lock-period-overrides/{periodStartDate}
• Soft Close: PATCH /v1/organizations/{organizationId}/soft-close-period-overrides/{periodStartDate}

Clearing an override returns that period to the default. The previews reflect an override for the period they show.