What is a Timesheet?
Timesheets are familiar to most and frankly dreaded by many. In the modern workplace, they are often an unrewarding responsibility owned by individuals entering time and individuals approving time, with benefits only accruing to leadership and finance. They most often take the form of a grid with projects or tasks as the leftmost column, and time periods (days, weeks, etc.) as the topmost row. Sometimes work is tracked to the minute, using timers; sometimes work is tracked in hours or days, the level of precision ideally perfectly matched to and reflecting the importance and cost time spent. While traditionally associated with payroll and labor costs, timesheets have nonetheless become an essential part of many project management tools. They provide a way to monitor progress, chargeback effort, track expenses, and plan resources effectively. In larger organizations, where multiple projects and teams overlap, timesheets ensure that time is used wisely and projects stay on track.
Empower Your Teams
Timesheets can be more than a way to record what happened. A considerate and well-implemented approach to timesheets can make objectives clear and crowd-source the native expertise of your team to drive superior results. With actionable insights at your fingertips, individuals and leadership can make smarter decisions, drive peak performance, and set teams up for long-term success. Choosing project management software equipped with timesheet templates and easy reporting tools helps you track time, resources, and progress, keeping your projects on track and helping your team work smarter to reach their goals.
Timesheets and Project Management
The Project Manager ‘s job is to ensure that a future state is achieved, ideally on time and on budget. Timesheets drive a virtuous feedback loop enabling project managers to make increasingly accurate data-driven predictions and decisions. They are used to generate reports that help identify bottlenecks, track task completion, and ensure resources are allocated effectively. At the enterprise level, this visibility is critical for coordinating large teams, managing complex projects, and ensuring alignment with strategic goals. Timesheets also create a foundation for future planning, enabling project managers to forecast timelines and resource needs with greater accuracy.
Tracking Actual Work
Timesheets record work completed, ensuring compliance, accountability, and accurate evaluations of individual team members. While adoption can be challenging, simplifying the process and building it into routines helps teams track time effectively without sacrificing accuracy.
Meeting Financial Reporting Requirements
Timesheets are essential for meeting financial regulations and tracking costs, such as software capitalization or chargebacks. Accurate time tracking ensures organizations can allocate resources effectively, avoid financial risks, and optimize costs.
Must-Have Timesheet Features
If you’re ready to leverage more robust timesheets with your project management, look for these features.
Feature 1: Integration with Best-of-Breed Tools
Many organizations use different project management tools across departments—development teams might use Azure DevOps, marketing may prefer Microsoft Project, and product teams might rely on Jira. While this diversity ensures flexibility, it often creates silos, making it difficult to track time across project tasks comprehensively. Timesheet management software that integrates with your team’s favorite tools means you get the benefit of automated time-tracking, losing what’s already working. OnePlan seamlessly connects to popular planning tools, allowing project managers to use tools that suit their needs. Examples include:
- Azure DevOps: For backlog items and agile project tracking.
- Microsoft Project for the Web/Desktop Professional: For traditional project management.
- Jira: For managing customer feedback interfaces or agile workflows.
When integrating with these tools, time tracking data remains consistent across the organization, no matter the preferred platform.
Feature 2: Logging Time Across Work Types
Projects are rarely limited to just tasks completed from a schedule; they include backlog items, change requests, and even ad-hoc issues. Without a unified system, tracking time for diverse work types can lead to incomplete or inaccurate data, making it hard to evaluate overall project effort. Team members can report time on a variety of work types, such as:
- Tasks from Microsoft Project schedules.
- Backlog items from Azure DevOps or Jira.
- Internal work types managed directly in OnePlan, such as issues or change requests.
This flexibility lets users track time easily, no matter where the work comes from. A unified timesheet management also allows users to log hours against various work types—tasks, backlog items, and even internally managed items like issues or changes. For example, if a developer works on a change request and a task simultaneously, both can be tracked in the same place. This ensures that project managers have a complete picture of where time is being spent.
Additionally, with flexibility of time categories, you may be able to create and manage multiple time tracking categories that align with your organization’s work structures. Oversee time spent at any level to ensure alignment with all your financial needs.
Feature 3: Detailed Time Tracking and Utilization
Over- or under-utilizing resources is a common pain point for managers and team members alike. The timesheet module in OnePlan provides visibility into allocated versus actual hours, helping team members track how much time they’ve really spent working and flagging tasks that are overcharged. For example, if a task has 8 allocated hours but 12 have been logged, the module highlights the discrepancy.
Detailed features in OnePlan’s timesheets include:
- Team members can log hours for specific tasks, with visibility into allocated hours versus actual hours worked.
- Overcharged tasks are highlighted, helping users avoid resource allocation discrepancies.
- Notes can be added at the individual task level to provide context, such as reasons for exceeding allocated hours.
To make a comment on a task or project from the timesheet:
- Click the Comments icon. The Comment window will open. You can view all previous comments on the task or project in the Comment window.
- In the Comment window, enter your comment.
- Press Enter to submit your comment.
Feature 4: Billable and Non-Billable Hours
For organizations that handle client billing, chargebacks, or need to distinguish between chargeable and internal hours, tracking billable and non-billable time is crucial. Failing to capture this data accurately can lead to revenue leakage or difficulty in cost analysis capacity planning. You may want to use a software that supports the categorization of time into billable and non-billable hours. This can be especially useful for:
- Organizations needing to capture true chargeability for client billing.
- Teams tracking internal chargebacks versus external project costs.
When users are able to categorize time entries as billable or non-billable, it ensures the most accurate data for financial tracking. For example, a consulting firm might log client-facing tasks as billable while tracking internal meetings as non-billable. This granularity provides clarity for financial reporting and aligns with organizational goals.
Feature 5: Managerial Review and Approval
A streamlined approval process helps maintain accurate time records and ensures logged work hours match actual project hours. Without a clear system, managers can miss critical discrepancies or lack important context for time entries.
A timesheet process simplifies the approval process:
- Managers receive notifications when timesheets are submitted.
- An approval grid enables managers to review time entries and associated notes before approving.
- Approved hours can be pushed back to tools like Microsoft Project, Jira, or Azure DevOps to update task-level data.
In OnePlan, managers are notified when employee timesheets are submitted and can review entries via an approval grid. For example, they can view notes explaining why a team member exceeded allocated hours or assess whether logged hours align with project progress. This centralized review process helps maintain data accuracy and ensures that adjustments are made before the hours are integrated into external tools like Jira or Microsoft Project.
It’s easy to submit your timesheets in OnePlan. Once your timesheet is complete, you need to submit it for review.
- Check the check box next to the timesheet rows you would like to submit for review.
- Click the Submit button in the timesheet header. The selected timesheet rows will be sent off to your timesheet manager for review and approval.
Feature 5: Unified View of Time Management
When teams use multiple tools for project tracking, it’s easy for timesheet data to become fragmented. Managers lack a single source of truth, which can hinder decision-making and prevent accurate reporting across projects. Key benefits of centralized time-tracking data include:
- Allowing team members to manage time across various tools in one location.
- Providing a holistic view of time spent across all project types and tools.
- Enhancing organizational insights into resource utilization and project performance.
Feature 6: Reporting
You’ve gathered all this valuable timesheet data — so what’s next? Sharing insights like successes and bottlenecks with internal teams and stakeholders is key to driving improvements. For the data-driven project managers, consider an AI-powered tool that analyzes timesheet data in real-time ensuring smarter resource management and better outcomes for current and future projects.
