Team Activity: facts about the work, not the person
What Achekam's Team Activity page shows partners and managers, how its AI reading is limited, and why there are work figures but no appraisals.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
On a Monday morning a managing partner wants answers to two questions. Is the work moving? And is anyone quietly drowning while someone else has room to spare?
The trouble is that the reports which answer those questions can slide into something else: a league table, a surveillance screen, a verdict on who is "lazy". Once staff believe a report is judging them, they start managing the report instead of the work, and the figures stop meaning anything.
Achekam's Team Activity page is designed to stay on the right side of that line. It states facts about the work and names who owns it. It does not grade the person.
What the page puts in front of a leader
Team Activity sits under WORK & DELIVERY. For each person it shows two kinds of time set against their working hours:
- Recorded time: what the person has put on their timesheet.
- Captured time: what Achekam recorded automatically while they had a client, engagement or work item open.
Automatic capture uses only counts of key presses, clicks and scrolling, never the keys typed, and it reaches the timesheet only when the person confirms it, by default. A firm can switch capture off under Settings > Time & presence. Because captured activity is information about named people, a South African firm deciding whether to keep it on should consider the Protection of Personal Information Act, which sets the conditions for processing personal information lawfully. Where it is on, a gap between captured and recorded time is a question about the timesheet, not an accusation. The person may simply not have confirmed the week yet. The mechanics are set out in automatic time capture.
Alongside the time, the page lists the work due on each person next. That is the part leaders tend to use most: it shows whose review is due tomorrow, whose list is empty, and where a deadline has nobody's hours against it.
Who has room, and what "not set" means
Spotting spare capacity needs two further screens.
Under WORK & DELIVERY > Hours: Allocated vs Consumed, staff compare each engagement's planned hours with the hours logged. Under Capacity / Resource Planner, the firm sees people by weeks. A week for which nobody has recorded capacity shows as "not set".
That label matters. A blank week is not evidence that someone is free. It may be leave, study time or a client secondment that nobody entered. Before giving a person a new file because the planner looks empty, check that the empty weeks are really empty.
The AI reading and what it may not say
Leaders can ask for an AI reading of the report. Its brief is narrow. It may rank and explain the report's own facts, for example which engagements have work due with little time recorded against them, or which people carry the most due items. Any finding about a person's character or effort is dropped before the leader sees it.
In practice this means the reading can say that a review is due and has no recorded time, and name whose review it is. It will not say that the person is disengaged, careless or slow. Those are judgements, and judgements about people belong in a conversation, not in a generated paragraph.
Treat the reading as a starting list of questions. It summarises; it does not know why the figures look the way they do.
"Performance Reviews" is a table of work figures
There is a menu entry called Performance Reviews. Be clear about what it opens: Achekam keeps no staff appraisals. The entry leads to a table of each person's work figures, namely items completed, items returned by review, hours, and on-time rate.
Those figures are real, drawn from the work itself, and they can usefully inform an appraisal conversation. But the appraisal, with its goals, ratings and development plans, happens outside Achekam. Nobody should read the table as a rating.
Period reports for the wider view
For a month, a quarter or a year, use WORK & DELIVERY > Time Reports. It offers ten reports for a chosen period, among them staff time, engagement time and utilisation, and each can be exported as CSV, XLSX or PDF.
Utilisation in these reports is never based on keyboard or mouse activity. It comes from time, so it measures how hours were spent, not how busy someone's hands were.
Using the page well
A short routine keeps the page useful rather than threatening:
- Start from the work. "The VAT review for this client is due on Friday and has no time against it" is a fact you can act on. "You're behind" is not.
- Ask before concluding. Unrecorded time is often training, leave or a client meeting not yet on the timesheet.
- Record capacity. Every "not set" week you fill in makes the planner more honest.
- Name the owner, then help. The page names who owns each due item so the owner can be supported, not so they can be blamed.
- Keep the AI reading in its place. Use it to find where to look, then look.
The same principles apply at the approval step. Timesheets approved weekly, as described in approving timesheets before billing, make every figure on this page more reliable.
Why the firm benefits from restraint
A report that sticks to facts about the work earns trust. Staff can see the same figures their partner sees and know what they mean. Managers can move work early, before a deadline is missed. And when a write-down does happen at billing, as covered in WIP write-downs, the firm can trace it to the work rather than to a guess about someone's attitude.
Open Team Activity with the team leader beside you, pick the three items due soonest with the least time recorded, and ask the owners what they need.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
