If your team logs time in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, you can now require that every entry duration be a multiple of a value you choose. Set it to 15 minutes, or an hour, or whatever your policy says, and Project Operations will not let anyone create or modify a time entry that falls outside that increment. This affects anyone who bills by the hour, reports utilization, or spends part of every month correcting timesheets before invoicing.
The release note is short, and the mechanism is straightforward: you configure the allowable increment, and once it is enabled, entries have to conform. What used to be a rule in a policy document or a reminder in a team meeting is now a control inside the system.
Why this matters for a services business
Time entry errors do not stay in the timesheet. A 7-minute entry becomes an odd line on a customer invoice, which becomes a question from the client, which becomes a credit memo or a write-off, which becomes a distorted margin on that project. The cost is rarely the money in that one entry. It is the review cycle it triggers and the confidence it costs you in your own utilization numbers.
Enforcing the increment at the point of entry moves that cleanup out of your billing week. Your project managers stop reconciling and start reviewing. Your reported hours match your billing rules by construction rather than by correction. For a firm that is growing headcount, this is the kind of control that stops the monthly close from getting longer every time you add a consultant.
Not in the timesheet itself, but in invoice review, dispute frequency, and how much you trust utilization reporting when you are deciding whether to hire.
What it takes to use it
This is part of Dynamics 365 Project Operations and arrives as part of the 2026 release wave 1. A few practical points, all drawn from the release note itself:
- Somebody with administrative rights has to configure it. It is not on by default: the note describes it as something you enable and set a value for, so nothing changes in your environment until you decide the increment.
- The rule applies to creating and modifying entries. That means it governs corrections, not just first-time submissions, which is where a lot of odd durations get introduced.
- The release note does not specify which license, plan, or seat type is required to configure or use it, and it does not name any region restrictions. That is worth confirming against your own Project Operations subscription before you build a policy change around it.
We would not assume anything beyond that. If you need certainty on licensing before committing to a rollout, checking your specific tenant and plan is the right step, not reading between the lines of the note.
The decision in front of you
The technical work here is small. The judgment call is the increment, and it belongs to whoever owns your billing policy, not to IT.
Some things worth talking through internally before you flip it on:
- What does your client contract or engagement letter say about rounding? Enforce the number you have committed to, not a rounder one.
- Does the same increment work across every service line? A support desk logging short interruptions and a consulting team logging half-day blocks may not want the same rule.
- How will people handle a genuinely short piece of work? If your increment is an hour, your team needs to know the expected behavior before they hit the block, or they will improvise.
- Who tells your clients? If entries start looking different on invoices, a short heads-up is cheaper than a dispute.
Run it past one team first if you can. A single project or practice group will surface the awkward cases faster than a tenant-wide announcement will.
If you want a second opinion
Most of the firms we work with already have a rounding rule. What they do not always have is that rule enforced anywhere except in a manager's memory. This closes that gap, and it is a quick win in the part of the month that tends to be the most stressful.
If you would like to walk through what increment makes sense for how you bill, or check what your Project Operations plan covers before you change anything, we are happy to talk it through with you.