Questions, answered.

No. Cadence never takes screenshots and never records your screen, at any point. It does not log your keystrokes, and it cannot see the contents of your files, emails, or messages. It is a tracker, not a watcher.

Every few seconds Cadence notes three things: the name of the application in front of you, that window’s title, and, for web browsers only, the address of the tab you are on. That is the raw material it groups into time entries by client and project. It is plain text about which app and window you are using, never an image of your screen.

This one is a genuine source of confusion. On a Mac, the only switch Apple provides that lets an app read the titles of your open windows is the one labelled Screen Recording. Despite the name, granting it to Cadence simply allows it to read window titles. No image of your screen is ever captured or stored.

If you choose not to grant it, Cadence still works and still tracks time. It just records the application name only, for example “Google Chrome”, with the window titles left blank and no web addresses captured at all. You lose detail on the timeline, but nothing identifying which document or client was on screen ever leaves the machine.

No. The detailed activity record, including window titles and browser addresses, is private to you. The database enforces this at the row level: only the person who generated that activity can read it. Managers and administrators do not see your raw window titles or the sites you visited. What they see is rolled-up time, grouped by client and project, in reports and summaries. Your activity detail is for building your own timeline, not for reporting on you.

No to all three. Cadence does no keystroke logging, never touches your webcam or microphone, and has no idle-shaming or productivity score designed to police you. Those things simply are not part of the product.

Yes. If you do not grant the macOS Screen Recording permission, Cadence still tracks time, but it only records the application name, never the window title or web address. So it might note that Chrome or Excel was in front of you, but never which client, document, or page. For teams working with confidential financial or client material, this is a practical way to keep that detail entirely off the record while still capturing billable hours.

Tracking also only runs while you are signed in to the desktop app, and the app always shows a live green “tracking now” signal, so you can see at a glance whether the current moment is being captured. Nothing happens behind your back.

Cadence does not record activity while your computer is asleep or shut down, and that gap is not counted as work. Tracking happens only while the app is running and you are signed in.

Your activity is first recorded locally, on your own machine, and then synced into Cadence’s database, hosted with our infrastructure provider Supabase on managed cloud (AWS). All data is encrypted at rest using AES-256 and encrypted in transit using TLS. Integration tokens get a second layer of application-level encryption with per-organisation keys.

Our database and infrastructure provider, Supabase, is SOC 2 Type II compliant (audited annually by an independent third party) and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified across its platform. It also supports HIPAA and is aligned with GDPR. Card payments are handled by our PCI-DSS compliant payment processor, so Cadence never stores your card details.

Yes, and by construction rather than by promise. Every record in Cadence is stamped with the organisation it belongs to, and the database applies row-level security so an organisation can only ever read rows carrying its own stamp. There is no query, accidental or otherwise, that can reach across that boundary. It holds for every request from the app and from the public API.

No. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with third-party advertisers, and we do not use your data to train machine-learning models. Cadence keeps integrations first-party and does not hand the names of your clients or projects to outside services.

We keep your account and time-tracking data for as long as your account is active. If you or your organisation administrator deletes the account, we remove your personal data within 30 days, except where we are required by law to retain it. The full terms live in our privacy policy.

Yes. Your time data is never locked in. You can export your time entries to CSV or XLSX at any time and use them in a spreadsheet, an invoice, or another system.

Cadence is a desktop app for macOS and Windows. You download it from our downloads page and it keeps itself up to date automatically.

No. That is rather the point. Cadence builds your time entries from a quiet record of what you work on, so the day turns into hours on its own. There is no stopwatch to start and no web dashboard to keep open.

Yes. Your timeline is yours to review and adjust. You see what was tracked and shape it into the entries you want before they become part of a report.

Managers see rolled-up time, grouped by client and project, in reports and summaries, governed by their role within the organisation. They do not see your raw window titles or the individual websites you visited. That detail stays private to you.

Yes, as read-only context. You paste a private iCal or ICS link from Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple iCloud, and your meetings appear alongside your tracked time to help you label the day. It is strictly read-only: Cadence never changes your calendar, and the link is stored only on your own computer.

Yes. Your activity is recorded locally on your machine first, so tracking continues whether or not you are connected. When you are back online, it syncs up quietly in the background.

Cadence is one plan with every feature, priced per user, billed monthly or yearly in South African Rand and inclusive of VAT. You pay only for the people who use it. See the pricing page for the current figures.

Yes, a 21-day free trial, with no card required to start. You can try it with your team before committing.

If you cancel, your organisation’s data stops being active and is removed in line with our retention policy rather than kept indefinitely, so export anything you want to keep before you go. Your CSV and XLSX exports make that straightforward.

Cadence is built for South African organisations and is designed to support your obligations under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), and the GDPR where it applies. We give you the privacy controls and the disclosures: data minimisation, per-person privacy on activity detail, organisation-level isolation, export, and deletion.

As the employer, you remain the responsible party for your own staff: you decide to use a time tracker and you should tell your team you are using it, in line with your workplace monitoring policy. Our privacy policy and terms of service set out the full detail, and the rights your people can exercise.