We are a small internal audit team - 10 resources and need an interim time recording tool to track and report on actual and estimated time for audit by audit phase. We are considering an excel Option or similar.  Our separate HR system tracks time for salary.  Are there any teams who are using this type of tool? Or know of any available options?

I would have them evaluate Clockify and break their audits down into a project with different tasks that are assigned different auditors and each task can be time tracked wholistically.

The various GRC tool that my teams have used have all had a native time capture capability, within the respective internal audit management modules.  In cases where we have not had a GRC tool, I have sometimes leveraged the time tracking tool that our IT resources use for time capture and chargeback.  We set each audit up as a project and then were able to capture time by phase.  The project time tracking tool was significantly more robust from a feature perspective than we needed, but we were ok with only using the minimal functionality that we required.

Project Planning Tools like Microsoft Project etc. may help.