Home » Blog » Create a Timesheet Report with Teamdeck

Sometimes well mastered time management strategies aren’t enough. But how do you track employee hours? How do you track employee hours? Do you use employee time tracking software and analyze reports? Do you have an Excel sheet or an actual paper timesheet devoted to logging hours? Or perhaps you don’t track time spent on various projects at all?

The article contains:

At Teamdeck, we know that effective timesheet management offers advantages to the company itself, but is also beneficial for the employees. Both sides are better off when the process is transparent and efficient. In this article, you’ll learn how to create a powerful timesheet report using Teamdeck’s reporting features. Based on this report, you will be able to calculate the payroll, invoice your clients and understand productivity patterns within your team.

But, before we show how to create a timesheet report, a few words about timesheets themselves. A timesheet is a table with data that contains tracked times a particular employee has worked during a certain time period and/or task, or project for a certain client. For this objective, many different methods are used to record timesheets. From a paper, dedicated timesheet software, employee time tracking app, or resource planner with time tracking and timesheet reports features.

Build a simple timesheet report

In order to create a basic report based on your team’s timesheets, you need to access their logged hours. Teamdeck offers time tracking features (including a mobile time tracker), so you’ll be able to create reports using your employees’ tracked time data.

Not sure how to track time with Teamdeck? Our knowledge base should help. 

Ready to start building your timesheet report? Log in to Teamdeck and head to the reporting section – you’ll find it in the top menu. Now, when you click on Create new report, you will have two options:

  • use a report template
  • create a custom analysis

While reporting templates are certainly useful and may speed up your work, in this article you’ll learn how to create timesheet reports from scratch. Go ahead and click on create custom.

Detailed timesheet report and worked hours spent by each employee starts with creating a new report
Creating timesheet report [Source: Teamdeck - resource planning software with time tracking and timesheet report features]

Now, that you’ve generated an empty report, you can easily feed it with data. Don’t forget to name it and select an appropriate date range (both elements can be edited anytime).

Let’s start by adding a new table (click add table) with basic information about your team’s time. You’ll notice that timesheets are already listed in your new table, together with Bookings, Availabilities, and Vacation data. If you want to analyze timesheet information exclusively, you can remove the other columns by clicking on a trash bin icon. You should end up with a table divided into different projects.

Projects report with detailed timesheet example informs about the past team performance
Timesheet data divided into particular projects and team members

Want to see logged hours of particular user and employee on your team? Simply change the way the data in your table is grouped:

Grouping report data in Teamdeck
Managing overtime hours based on timesheet reports

Look at the screen above. Depending on your needs, you can group information by people. projects, weeks, and so on, all in order for you to better understand your team’s workload and team performance (more about workload management).

Such a table can act as a base for calculating employee payroll. You can also filter the data to include e.g. only particular projects. Such a report is then a great addition to your client invoice if you’re charging by the hour.

Click on a plus icon in the bottom right corner, if you want to add more elements to your report. Visualize the timesheet by creating a line chart or a bar chart. You may also want to check the proportion of different projects in your team’s total logged time. A pie chart will be helpful here:

Employee time spent for different projects to get better insight into project budget
Tracked time distribution summary report displays hours worked and tasks

Analyzing the data with different visualization methods may help you uncover new insights – e.g. the fact that one project boasts 30% of your team’s time, even though it’s hardly as profitable as other things you have in the pipeline.

Break your timesheets down into custom categories (billable/non-billable hours etc.)

Having access to your employees’ logged hours is definitely valuable, but drilling down this data may prove to be even more beneficial. Having read the paragraphs above, you know how to group your data into basic categories (people, projects, time periods). Now, it’s time to get a little bit more sophisticated and introduce custom categories that you can set up on your own. These custom insights can be generated using:

  • timesheet tags
  • custom fields

What’s the difference between these two? Timesheet tags may be added to each tracked time entry, so they are describing the logged hours themselves. Common examples of timesheet tags are billable, non-billable, and overtime but you can add your own tags to provide more information to the timesheet view. Custom fields, on the other hand, describe either projects or people.

Most of our clients use the “Job title” custom field to be able to group their workforce into different categories based on their competencies. You may also want to group your projects into different “Client” categories, especially if you’re working on multiple projects for a number of companies.

You can manage both tags and custom fields in the Settings of your organization.

Timesheet tags
Default timesheet tags can be edited to match your needs

Why is it useful to have custom categories you can group all your data into?

First of all, it allows you to create a view that makes 100% sense to your company. For instance, you can compare timesheets from different office locations of your company.

Timesheet tags allow you to drill down the data and monitor a category of choice: for example, you can group together timesheets tagged as overtime, billable or even home office, if a given breakdown makes sense for your organization.

Custom timesheets report

Want to get even more insights into your team’s timesheets? You can add a column called “Timesheet description” to import every time entry’s description into your report. Descriptions are comments made by your team members when they log in their timesheet entries. Seeing these descriptions will help you realize what exactly caused certain trends in your team’s timesheets.

Teamdeck - the agency time tracking app that basic features help with analysing of each team member working hours and availability
Team utilization and timesheet descriptions in Teamdeck - the resource planner with time tracking and timesheets features

Book a consultation with Teamdeck experts. We’ll help you set up even the most sophisticated reports.

Analyze your team’s overtime rate

One of the benefits of time tracking is that you can keep track of your employees’ overtime. We’ve already mentioned that one way to do that with Teamdeck would be to ask your employees to use a timesheet tag overtime every time they’re working extra hours.

However, you can also calculate overtime without having to rely on correct tagging. How? All you need is the number of estimated working hours (or available hours) and, of course, the number of actual/logged hours.

Teamdeck help with overtime management as well. It allows you to store both the available hours (as your employees’ availability as well as estimated working hours (bookings). Having this kind of data at your disposal, you can create an accurate report of your team’s overtime. Let’s create it step by step.

  • Start a new report (a custom one).
  • Add a new table and leave Bookings and Timesheets columns there (instead of Bookings, you could use Availability). 
An overtime report displays the total number of resources, bookings, and timesheets
  • Now, we need to create a new column for overtime. In order to create it, you have to click on metrics, then add custom and add custom calculation field. This option allows you to define your own metrics derived from data available in Teamdeck. How to calculate overtime? One can define it as the number of hours worked on top of the hours that were planned. So if your Timesheet time is bigger than the Bookings time, it means you worked extra.

Within the Add custom calculation field form, change the data format to Time and enter the following formula: Timesheets: Time – Bookings: Time. Click Save and apply.

Overtime hours overview in the resource planning software
  • You should be able to see that there is now a new column in your timesheet report: Overtime. However, you may notice that there are some negative values there in rows where Timesheet data was actually lower than the Bookings data. It’s probably not a deal-breaker, but there is a way to clean it up.
  • If you want your Overtime column to display positive numbers only, you can define it back in the custom calculation field form. We need to create an If statement that can be described as follows: if there is overtime (so the number of timesheet hours is higher than the number of bookings), enter the overtime value, otherwise enter “0”. The exact formula for this if statement is (please type that into the calculation field, you can’t paste it directly):

    if ((Timesheets:time-Bookings:time)>0,Timesheets:time-Bookings:time,0)

Forecast recruitment needs

Whether you decide to use the Overtime timesheet tag as a marker of extra hours or to calculate the Overtime column by yourself, you can still group the data in different ways, in order to better understand who and under what circumstances had to put in overtime.

One of the potential use cases could be to group your table by Job Titles (it’s a custom field) and then see which roles had extra hours spent on work. This way, you can forecast human resources and recruitment needs or improve your resource allocation.

Overtime in your team
Overtime hours and working time in your team divided into job positions and departments

Looking at the overtime hours report above, we can probably say that this company should hire additional marketing specialists, as the current employees in this role have a lot of overtime.

Ready to make decisions backed by data? Timesheet report with Teamdeck

Once you save a report in Teamdeck, it stays in your dashboard. Revisit your report regularly in order to see new patterns in the data and spot potential improvement areas.

Do you want to share these insights with your team? Do it directly in the app by clicking share. You can also export the data or generate a link to your report, so that it’s accessible by people from external organizations, e.g. your clients or payroll specialists.

There is virtually no limit to what can be done and analyzed with Teamdeck reports. Most importantly, reporting features are available for all users of the app. Regardless of whether you have 15 or 150 people on board, you’ll get to use robust timesheet reports to your advantage.

Create your timesheet report in a couple of minutes thanks to Teamdeck

Related posts