Keeping track of how much time your employees spend on certain tasks can prove to be difficult for many business owners and managers. Project leaders understand how important it is to have an efficient project timesheet overview to manage budgets, planning of future projects, and the hiring process.
Additionally, having an Excel timesheet template is a helpful tool for employees to improve their time management skills. Besides that, keeping track of how much time is spent on each project can boost your employees’ teamwork and productivity levels.
Nowadays, companies have a wide array of project management software tools to help them, but most of these software applications are quite expensive and can turn out to be counterproductive. Instead of helping you manage your time more efficiently, they can end up increasing your workload by giving your employees yet another task to manually keep track of and update.
In many cases, learning how to use this new software will end up causing confusion and frustration amongst your employees while certain sets of your company’s data end up being mismanaged or even lost.
To prevent any mishaps from happening in your company’s project management, we show you how to easily keep track of your employees’ projects by using Sheetgo’s timesheet template in Excel.
How to get started
Sheetgo’s Timesheet management in Excel is a pre-built system made to automate timesheet management and can be used by any team, in any organization.
The template provides employees with an easy and reliable way to log tasks. Additionally, managers get an overview of timescales and progress.
What you get with this template
After you have installed the Sheetgo Timesheet template in Excel, four Microsoft Excel files will be saved to your Onedrive or chosen cloud-based account:
- Three Colleague spreadsheets. Share these spreadsheets with your colleagues and make copies when needed. Every employee will have access to their own copy and can log how much time they spend on each task. Besides that, they can monitor their own progress in their personal dashboard.
- One Timesheet management master sheet, for the project manager. The master sheet is connected to the individual Colleague spreadsheets by Sheetgo connections and pulls data from these files. As such, it generates an automated dashboard with an overview of the number of hours worked per day, per colleague, and per project.
Sign up for Sheetgo and start tracking your team’s progress
How to install Sheetgo’s Timesheet template in Excel
- Click here to install the template.
- Login to Sheetgo with your Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox account.
- Click Install on Onedrive or choose your preferred platform from the drop down list.
- Please allow a few moments as Sheetgo creates the connections and saves a copy of the template files to your chosen account.
Step 1: Select timeframe
First, open the Timesheet management master sheet by double-clicking the file in the workflow view. Now go to the Dashboard tab. Select the timeframe you wish to examine.
Managers get an overview of the number of hours spent per task, colleague, day, or project in this tab. If you prefer working in Excel, simply click Open in Desktop App.
Step 2: Enter project tasks
Next, go to the Projects and Tasks tab. Replace the sample data with the names of all your current projects and tasks.
After you’ve entered your current projects and tasks, update your workflow. Do this by going back to the tab with the workflow view. Click Run in the right bottom corner of the screen.
Step 3: Share the Colleague files with your co-workers
In your workflow, double click on one of the Colleague spreadsheets. When it opens in a new tab, select Share and enter the email address of the colleague you wish to share this spreadsheet with.
Repeat this process for the other Colleague spreadsheets. Once they have access, they can rename the spreadsheets to their own names.
Start tracking your team’s progress
Step 4: Start entering your data
Now that you’ve shared the individual input spreadsheets with your colleagues, they can start logging their work.
They do this in the Timesheet Report tab of their personal spreadsheet (Colleague #1, #2, #3). Remember that the template contains sample data.
Step 5: Automate your workflow
Now that the system is up and running you can automate the entire process. This will ensure that you always have up-to-date data in your reports.
The Sheetgo connections transfer the data at regular intervals without you having to open a spreadsheet.
To ensure that you and your colleagues always have the latest data in your sheets, automate the entire workflow.
Go to the workflow view. Click Automate instead of Run.
Slide the bar to Update automatically and select how often you want transfers. See how many transfers per month your selection will approximately amount to at the bottom of the Schedule settings tab.
That’s it!
Congratulations on setting up the Timesheet template in Excel!
Looking for more Excel-based workflow templates? Check out this post about Sheetgo’s automated Marketing KPIs template.
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