Kimai is a time tracker that runs quietly in the background: customers, projects, activities, rates, invoices. None of it is hard, but the first month involves a lot of clicking, and small setup mistakes compound into messy timesheets. Your server ships with a vibe-code agent in the Open WebUI chat that can read the Kimai configuration, run its console commands, and work the database directly. These ten jobs are the everyday ones worth delegating first.

1. Stand up your customer, project, and activity tree

Kimai’s hierarchy puts customers at the top, projects under them, and activities as the leaves where time actually gets logged. Getting this shape right on day one matters more than any setting you will touch later, because every report and invoice reads from it. The agent builds the tree through the console and API while you watch the result appear in the UI, and it can explain why it grouped activities the way it did. Say: “Create three customers — Acme, Beta, and Internal — put two projects under each, and give every project the activities Design, Development, and Meetings.”

2. Reconstruct a forgotten week of time entries

Nobody logs time every day. The usual fix is an hour of clicking through the calendar view, recreating each day from memory. Instead, dictate the week roughly and let the agent draft the entries, then adjust them yourself before anyone invoices. It can spread hours sensibly across the days and stop the clock at sane boundaries. Say: “Last week on Acme’s Website project I worked Monday and Tuesday 9 to 5, Wednesday just the morning, and Friday afternoon. Create the entries as Development and I’ll adjust them.”

3. Set hourly and fixed rates where they belong

Kimai lets you price work at several levels: a global hourly rate per user, a per-project rate for a user, and a per-activity rate, with the most specific one winning. Fixed rates are different — they replace the hourly math for a single entry, which is how you bill a flat support call. The agent sets all of this and shows you the precedence table so the billing math stops being tribal knowledge. Say: “Set my default rate to 95 euros, but 110 on the Acme project, and make anything logged under the Support activity bill a fixed 60 instead of hourly.”

4. Tag entries and split billable from overhead

Tags are Kimai’s cheapest reporting tool. Billable versus internal, on-site versus remote, retainer versus extra — anything you tag today you can filter and total tomorrow. The agent can backfill a month of tags from descriptions and activities, then hand you totals per tag so you can sanity-check the split before it feeds an invoice. Say: “Go through last month and tag client-facing work as billable and internal work as overhead, then show me the totals per tag.”

5. Save the report views your weekly review needs

The timesheets screen filters by almost anything, and each filter combination can be saved for reuse. Owners typically want three or four standing views: hours per project per user, unbilled billable entries, entries over a threshold, and a monthly totals view. The agent builds them and saves them under your user so they appear in the menu every Monday without rebuilding. Say: “Save me a monthly view grouped by project and user showing hours and revenue, plus a standing view of everything tagged billable that has no invoice yet.”

6. Turn tracked time into an invoice

Invoicing in Kimai means filtering entries, choosing a template, and exporting the result as PDF or an office format. It is five careful steps the first time, and the agent can walk you through each one by actually doing it on real entries. Once your template and numbering are set, this becomes a two-sentence job you repeat monthly. Say: “Invoice Acme for everything unbilled from September with the standard template, use invoice number INV-2026-041, and export the PDF to my files.”

7. Hunt down duplicates and impossible entries

A running entry left open from last week or a 22-hour day will quietly poison your totals and your invoices. The agent queries the database for entries longer than a sane day, overlapping entries for the same user, and near-duplicates created by double-submitting, then lists what it found before changing anything. You pick what to fix and it edits or deletes the rest in one pass, with an audit trail of what moved. Say: “Find any entries over 12 hours from the last two months plus overlapping entries for the same user, and propose fixes before you touch anything.”

8. Freeze the past with the lockdown period

Kimai’s lockdown setting closes a date range for editing after a grace period, which is how you stop accidental — or conveniently timed — edits to submitted time. It is one of those settings everyone intends to configure at quarter end and forgets. The agent sets the period, tells you which roles can still edit through it, and switches it on. Say: “Lock everything before October 1 so nobody can edit September anymore, give a three-day grace period, and tell me which users are affected.”

9. Onboard a teammate with the right access

A new user in Kimai is one console command, but “set up properly” also means role, team assignment, project visibility, hourly rate, and an API password for integrations. Miss any of those and you spend the next week debugging access complaints. The agent runs the whole chain and hands you a summary you can paste into your onboarding doc. Say: “Add Priya with a teamlead role, give her access to the Beta projects only, set her rate to 80, and create her API password.”

10. Export the month for your accountant

Accountants want a spreadsheet with boring, predictable columns, and Kimai’s export module can produce exactly that once configured. The agent sets up an export template with the columns your accountant asked for, generates the file for the period, and puts it somewhere you can download. Say: “Export all October entries as an XLSX with customer, project, activity, user, date, duration, and rate, one sheet per customer.”

Pick one job above and watch the agent do it before handing over the rest. The review loop is the real product: describe, watch, keep what works. Kimai on OpenSysLab