So obviously this sucks, however.

Look into timewarrior+taskwarrior. They’re the only tools I’ve ever seen for these types of tasks that don’t fucking suck ass.

Then they never ask for non-ticket work outside of that… right?! (Somehow I suspect this person will want it to go their way both ways)

One time when I was contracting and my company was in the middle of a merger I had to do triple time keeping; client, old company, new company, all on different systems, two of which were ancient hr software from the 90s for some reason still in use 5 years ago. Its at that point I just started blanket logging 6 hours per day on whatever project I could think of at the moment.

It’s simple: Either the project management team keeps the customer away from my time tracking or I’ll keep my time away from that customer