In this article, you will discover how Suggestions automatically proposes hours based on your connected calendar and how TimeChimp strictly protects your privacy and GDPR data.
Within TimeChimp, we want to make tracking hours as simple and fast as possible. With the Suggestions feature, time registrations are automatically prepared for you based on your connected calendar events and your historical work patterns.
In this article, we explain step-by-step how this functionality works, how to activate or deactivate it, and how we strictly protect your privacy and GDPR data.
Please note: A time registration is never automatically submitted for approval. As an employee, you always retain full control and manually approve, modify, or reject suggestions yourself.
How does Suggestions work?
The system makes a smart match by safely combining two major sources: your hours history of the past 90 days and the titles/descriptions of your calendar events for the selected day. This process consists of the following 3 steps:
1. Build a work profile
TimeChimp first reads the time registrations of the past 90 days. From this, the system learns which combinations of projects and tasks you use frequently, on which days, and at what times. This anonymous profile is cached for 12 hours to keep the app super-fast.
2. Safely clean calendar data
As soon as you open your time tracking overview, the calendar events are loaded. Before an AI model analyzes the text, TimeChimp automatically filters out all privacy-sensitive data. Email addresses, full URLs, and links to meeting platforms (such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom) are stripped immediately and permanently.
3. Propose suggestion
Based on text matches and your historical work patterns, our AI model determines the best match. Is the confidence score high enough? Then the suggestion appears directly pre-filled with the correct project, task, and number of hours in your overview, recognizable by a suggestion icon.
Privacy & Data Security (GDPR)
We understand that your calendar may contain personal or commercially sensitive information. That is why privacy is built-in from the ground up (Privacy by Design):
No OpenAI or ChatGPT: All AI processing takes place entirely within the European Union via a dedicated Mistral model on our own, strictly secured Microsoft Azure infrastructure. Your data never leaves the EU.
Stateless model: The AI model is completely stateless. This means it calculates a suggestion, returns it directly to your timeline, and immediately forgets the data afterwards. Your data is therefore never used to train the AI model.
Smart filters for private events: Calendar items such as a lunch break, doctor's appointment, gym session, or holiday are automatically recognized and skipped immediately.
Absolute data isolation: Data from your organization is strictly shielded and invisible to other companies. Mapping patterns are never shared outside your own environment.
How do you turn Suggestions on or off?
You have full control over this functionality. This can be managed on two levels:
As an employee, you decide for yourself whether you want to use suggestions.
Within TimeChimp, navigate to your Settings (via your profile icon at the top right).
Go to the My Settings tab.
Toggle the Enable Suggestions option on or off.
Click on Save.
For the administrator (Organization level)
As an administrator, you can centrally manage the feature for the entire organization:
Go to Manage > Settings.
Click through to the General section.
Toggle Suggestions off to disable the feature for all employees.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Can my manager or employer see my unapproved suggestions? No. Suggestions are strictly personal and only visible in your own TimeChimp environment. Only when you check and actually save or submit a suggestion, does it become visible to a manager or administrator.
Are my emails, documents, or chat messages read? No. The system exclusively has access to your historical TimeChimp registrations and the titles/short descriptions of the calendar you explicitly connected. No emails or chat messages are viewed.
What does the optional Activity Tracker entail? This is a completely optional desktop companion app (opt-in) that will be available later. This application checks which software or websites you use to make suggestions even more accurate. Here too, privacy comes first: screenshots or keystrokes are never stored, full URLs are shortened to the root domain name (e.g., figma.com), and window titles are broken down into separate, anonymous words.
Delete data?
When an employee or organization submits a request to erase data, all stored suggestion logs, feedback history, and cached work profiles are immediately and permanently removed from our databases[cite: 2, 3]. Please contact support@timechimp.com for this purpose.