What Cardinal is

Getting started. Cardinal measures human and AI hours, cost and leverage, and turns them into quotes, invoices and team reports.

Cardinal measures how you and Claude work together: the hours you spend at the keyboard, the time Claude spends working, what it costs, and what the work earns. It then uses those numbers for the jobs around the work: quotes, invoices, books and team reports.

What it counts

Your hours: active time at the keyboard in Claude sessions, plus time you enter by hand (calls, meetings, admin).
AI time: how long Claude and its agents ran, with parallel runs merged.
Cost: the real cost of your Claude subscription spread over the work, and what the same tokens would cost at API prices ("API-equivalent").
Money: quotes, invoices, payments and the effective rate you earn per hour of your own time against your floor rate.

What it never counts

No prompt or response text is collected. Cardinal sees usage numbers (time, tokens, cost, sessions) and, from the session-end hook, the folder a session ran in and when it closed.

Where AI work runs

When Cardinal drafts something with AI (invoice words, payment reminders, pitch decks, timesheet labels, your briefing, answers from the guide), the job runs on your own computer through your own claude -p, on your own Claude plan. Cardinal never sees or stores your Claude login. If your computer is off, the job waits and the page says "Waiting for your computer…".

Who sees what

The workspace owner sees the tracker and money pages: Overview, Day, Projects, Clients, Heatmap, Trends, Inbox, Quotes, Invoices, Ledger and Settings.
Everyone has their own page, Me.
Managers and execs also see Team, and execs see Deals. What they see follows the reporting tree.

Start with the setup on your computer, then open Today.