Five calls split on a sharp financial boundary. Agents can see all time logged — billable and non-billable — and they can log their own internal effort, but they cannot touch anything that affects a customer invoice.
The time MCP tool ships five calls. The split between them tells you exactly where the team trusts an agent to act and where it doesn’t.
get_time_entries — read non-billable time entries for a user, by date range
get_resource_time — read items with billable time logged by a user, by date range
create_time_entry — log non-billable time
update_time_entry — edit a non-billable time entry
delete_time_entry — remove a non-billable time entryTwo reads. Three writes. And a sharp boundary running through the surface: the writes only touch non-billable time.
Both kinds. get_time_entries returns the user’s non-billable entries — the PTO, the training time, the “spent 30 minutes on a Slack thread that turned into nothing,” the R&D blocks. get_resource_time returns the items the user has logged billable time against — which projects, which cycles, how long each.
An agent can build a complete picture of where a user’s hours went last week from those two calls alone. That’s what the week-in-review prompt does, and it’s why no write is needed to draft a status note. The summarising agent reads; the human signs off; the writes (if any) happen elsewhere.
Only the non-billable side. create_time_entry, update_time_entry, delete_time_entry — all three operate on internal time codes, not customer-facing ones. An agent can log “30m: triaged the queue this morning” against the triage code. It can correct yesterday’s duration if it was off. It cannot touch a billable entry — not create, not edit, not delete. The audit trail that ends up on a customer invoice has one path into it, through the team’s billable flow with human attribution, and the MCP surface doesn’t shortcut that path.
Non-billable time is internal accounting. If an agent logs the wrong amount, the worst outcome is a noisy internal report — fix it, move on. Billable time is what the customer pays against. Wrong values become invoice disputes, margin distortion, audit findings. The value of an agent shaving thirty seconds off the entry path is much smaller than the risk of an agent inventing an hour against the wrong project.
The principle in one line: agents can record their own internal effort; agents cannot mutate anything that ends up on a customer invoice. The shape of the surface is the shape of that contract.
Two reads. Three writes. One financial boundary.
Full reference: ekso.dev/mcp-tools/time. The companion short on the finance MCP tool — which is read-only throughout — is here. The week-in-review walkthrough that consumes this surface is scheduled for later in the ramp.
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