Time Tracker Template

Contents

The Time Tracker app was developed to help organizations manage tracking of employee / contractor / consultant work hours against projects, contracts or budgets. It can help with client billing in consultancies, and project effort or budget tracking within organizations. If you need to track work hours for payment, audit or reporting, then this template would be a great starting point.

We actually use a version of this template internally to track our consultant’s billable work for clients and for internal projects. You set up clients and projects related to those clients, and then you can record one or more person’s work on those projects. For internal projects, you could setup divisions or departments as the ‘clients’. Completed time-sheet records go for review and either returned to the user for updates or marked a ‘Billable’. Records can then be marked as ‘Billed’ once the client has been billed. There are many view to allow workers and managers to easily see and report on hours by client, project, date, consultant (worker), etc.

Time Tracker Images

Setting Up the Time Tracker App

Please following these steps to get the Time Tracker app ready for use in your organization:

Clients – First, you need to create the list of clients, or internal divisions or departments, that can have projects. Go to the Lookup Lists section in the left side navigation, click on the Clients view, and then click + New at the top of the view. Create a Client record for each client you want to track project work for.
Projects – Then create the list of projects that you will track hours against. Go to the Lookup Lists section in the left side navigation, click on either ‘Project by …’ view, and then click + New at the top of the view. Create a Project record for each different work stream you want to track hours for.
You will need to assign the appropriate people to the security roles within the application. Go to Lookup Application Setting > Edit App in the left side navigation, and once the app design screen appears, select Security > Roles and Users in the left side design navigation. Then select each of the applications roles (discussed below in App Design Details), and use the right side panel, that appears when you select a role, to set who should be in the role.

Using the Time Tracker App

When you have a completed your work on a specific project for the day, create a Timesheet record. You create a new Timesheet for work on each different project, so you could have several Timesheet records on some days if you work on more than one project. Select the client first and then the project, because the projects list is filtered by the selected client. Then enter the hours worked and a description of the work completed. When done, click the Submit button.

Views display and sum up timesheet hours by consultant, project, client, Year/Month and more. To create specific reports, view filters can be used to refine the displayed records to only those you need to report on. For example, in the ‘Mgmt Report by Client’ view you could filter your data by a specific month or range of dates, or to a specific consultant, project, client, etc, and combine the filter setting to create very specific reports if you need to. You could use this approach to quickly create individual monthly reports for any client with hours billed in the month.

App Design Details

This app has one main app form called Timesheet. It is used to record details of work done on a particular project on a specific day.

This app also has two additional forms that are used to manage details of clients and projects that are looked up on the Timesheet form. (These records can only be created and edited by the App Admin role):

Client – An entity that a project can be created for. Could be actual companies or internal divisions or departments.
Project – A separately identifiable block of work related to a project, contract or budget. Workers log the hours they work against these projects.

This application has 4 security roles:

App Admin – Can create, edit and delete all Timesheet records, and also the Client and Project records.
Editor – Can create and edit Timesheet records, but not delete them. (They only have View access when Timesheet records are at the ‘Billed’ stage.) They can also view the Client and Project records. (They can’t see the billing rate and $ Amount on Timesheet records.)
Reader – Can create and view Timesheet records, but not edit them. They can also view the Client and Project records. (They can’t see the billing rate and $ Amount on timesheet records.)
Approvers – Can approve submitted Timesheet records. (The Approvers role only controls the approval stage. Users who are Approvers should also be given one of the three other roles if they need to use the app for any other function.)
Billing – Can see the two billing related views and see the billing rate and $ Amount on timesheet records. Can also mark them as ‘Billed’. (The Billing role only controls access to these billing related feature. Users who are Approvers should also be given one of the three other roles if they need to use the app for any other function.)

The workflow stages for Asset records, and the security access at each stage, are:

Draft – The App Admin role and Record Owner (Consultant) can edit and delete the record. The other roles have no access to the record at this stage.

Review – The App Admin role can edit and delete the record, the Editor roles can edit the record, and the Reader role and the Record Owner (Consultant) can see but not edit the record. The Approvers role and App Admin role can approve or return the Timesheet.
Resolve Issues – The App Admin role and the Record Owner (Consultant) can edit and delete the record, the Editor roles can edit the record, and the Reader role and the record owner (creator) can see but not edit the record
Billable – The App Admin role can edit and delete the record, the Editor roles can edit the record, and the Reader role and the Record Owner (Consultant) can see but not edit the record. The App Admin and Billing roles can see the billing data and mark records as billed.
Billed – The App Admin role can edit and delete the record, and the Reader and Editor roles and the Record Owner (Consultant) can see but not edit the record. The App Admin and Billing roles can see the billing data.

There is a single workflow notification email called ‘Send Back to Consultant’. It is sent when the Approver clicks the ‘Send Back to Consultant’ action button.

Updating the Time Tracker App

Don’t forget, as well as being a fully functional app that’s ready to go, the Time Tracker template app can also be a useful starting point for you to build from. If you want extra information tracked for your timesheets or want additional views to sort them in different ways, you can make those updates yourself.

Updated on August 11, 2022

Tagged: App Templates

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