A terminal UI that types your hours into the Personio days you have not filled in yet.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Personio SE. It drives their web UI exactly as you would, which is also why a redesign on their side can break it.

It types, you decide. The hours it writes are the hours you configured, so the record is only true if you keep it true. A timesheet is meant to match the hours actually worked — in many countries that is a legal obligation, not a formality. The month grid is there for exactly that: read it, and fix any day it got wrong.

Quick install

git clone https://github.com/araluce/personio-tracker
cd personio-tracker
make install PREFIX="$HOME/.local"     # or: cargo install --path .

make on its own lists the other targets, sudo make install puts it in /usr/local/bin, and Install covers DESTDIR packaging and how to uninstall. If the command is not found afterwards, $HOME/.local/bin is not on your PATH.

What you need

Rust	a current stable toolchain — the crate is edition 2024, and is developed and tested on 1.98. Needed to build only; the binary is self-contained
A Chromium browser	Chrome, Chromium or Edge. Not bundled: it is found at runtime, and --paths prints which one won
Nothing else	no OpenSSL, no pkg-config, no -dev packages. The dependency tree is pure Rust plus each platform's own APIs, which is why CI builds it on a bare Ubuntu runner with no install step

Where it runs

System	State	Detail
macOS	verified	developed here; the password goes in the login keychain
Linux	verified by CI	all 140 tests pass on ubuntu-latest. The password goes to the Secret Service over D-Bus (gnome-keyring, KWallet), or to PERSONIO_PASSWORD where none is running
Windows	untested	the browser paths and the Credential Manager backend are in the tree and it should build, but nobody has run it. Reports welcome

First run

personio-tracker

1. Fill in Email, Company and Employee ID — enter edits the selected field. The last one is not obvious; the app says where to find it under the field.
2. Press w to save, then t to run.
3. The first run opens a browser and logs in. Later runs replay that session, so they neither log in nor ask the OS for your password.

The grid under the configuration is the month at a glance, and it is drawn from a local record: opening the app shows where the month stands before anything runs.

? lists every key, and what each colour in the grid means:

Run it daily

The point of the thing: stop retyping the same two slots twenty times a month.

which personio-tracker    # the path depends on how you installed it
crontab -e                # opens $EDITOR; add the line below, save, done

0 9 * * * /usr/local/bin/personio-tracker --cli --headless >> "$HOME/Library/Logs/personio-tracker.log" 2>&1

Nothing to reload afterwards — crontab -l confirms it took. Saving writes the whole crontab, so leave any SHELL= and PATH= lines already in there alone.

--cli because a scheduler has no terminal, the absolute path because it has no useful PATH, and --headless because nobody is there to watch a browser open. Scheduled runs keep the month grid current too, so opening the app shows what was written without you ever pressing t — which is also how you review the month.

Try it before waiting for 09:00, since a failing cron job fails quietly:

/usr/local/bin/personio-tracker --cli --headless; echo "exit=$?"

On macOS, prefer a LaunchAgent. A cron job runs outside the logged-in session, where the keychain is out of reach — which only bites when the saved session expires, but then it needs you. A LaunchAgent runs inside the session and logs in by itself.

Scheduling has the plist to copy, the systemd option for Linux, and what to do when a run reports Login required.

Documentation

To…	Read
install it, or find where its files live	Install
set up email, company, employee id, work slots	Configuration
understand the password and session handling	Authentication
read the month grid and its colours	Month grid
know exactly what a run does to a timesheet	Tracking
schedule it: cron, launchd, systemd	Scheduling
drive the UI: keys, panes, the log	Interface
work on the code	Development

What it does

Walks the Personio timesheet from the current month backwards, registering the configured two work slots on every trackable day that has no entry yet. It stops at today's row (after filling it) and keeps stepping back a month while that month still has fewer confirmed hours than its target.

Weekends, public holidays and absences are skipped, with the reason Personio itself shows recorded in the log. Tracking has the whole walk, step by step.

The one thing to know

The selectors are Personio's, not ours. This drives their real web UI, so a redesign on their side breaks it. Everything that can break that way is listed in Tracking → When it breaks, and every selector lives in one file: src/tracking/selectors.rs.