Spreadsheet Time Tracking: A Complete Guide

Why should you track time in spreadsheets?

Let’s start our deep dive into spreadsheet time tracking with the benefits of the practice. The main ones are:

• Improved productivity
• Better work-life balance
• Enhanced payroll
• Affordability

Improved productivity

The main benefit of tracking time in your team, regardless of which method you choose, relates to productivity. Time tracking enables professionals to manage their work hours more effectively. They’ll then be able to get more done in the same amount of time, greatly boosting their performance. This has obvious benefits for businesses, as your company will be able to get more for its payroll spending.

Better work-life balance

Besides businesses, time tracking can be greatly beneficial for employees as well. With a time tracking spreadsheet, your staff will be able to monitor their work-life balance. A healthy work-life balance is vital to increasing productivity in the long run. As a result, time tracking can help you avoid issues like burnout in your team. Doing so will help you boost your team’s productivity in a sustainable way.

Enhanced payroll

If your company pays its employees by the hour, having accurate records of worked hours is vital. Without a time tracking spreadsheet, you risk paying your staff inaccurately—either too much or not enough—both of which have their own set of negative consequences. Paying hourly employees without time tracking will also be a lengthy process that will take your time away from important tasks.

Affordability

When compared to other forms of time tracking, spreadsheet time tracking is one of the most affordable and accessible. All you need to get started is some form of a spreadsheet, most likely inside a free spreadsheet app like Google Sheets.

How to Set Up Spreadsheet Time Tracking

Let’s now explore our main topic of conversation, setting up spreadsheet time tracking. This consists of a few steps:

• Assessing what you need to track
• Creating a simple layout
• Instructing your team to track their time

Like with many other things, tracking time in spreadsheets should start with an assessment of your requirements.

Assess what you need to track

Time tracking usually involves monitoring your staff’s total worked hours each day. However, you may need to keep track of different types of time—especially if you’re going to be using the strategy for payroll. Factors that play key roles in this include:

• Paid and unpaid breaks
• Different hourly rates for projects
• Overtime

To understand these further, let’s look at a few examples. If your firm doesn’t offer paid breaks, you’ll need to track your team’s breaks to keep your payroll costs in check. If you offer higher hourly rates for a particular project, you’ll need to track how much time your staff spend working on it separately. If you offer overtime at a rate different from your standard hours, you’ll need to keep track of that as well.

Create a simple layout

After identifying what exactly you need to track, you can create the spreadsheet your staff will need to fill out. You can use your spreadsheet time tracking software to make daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly timesheets. Your choice will depend on numerous factors, like how frequently you pay your team. Make sure to include all the key details you identified in the last step in your template, such as breaks and overtime.

Have your team track their time

The last step to setting up a spreadsheet time tracker is also the most important one. After creating a timesheet template, you need to send it to your staff and instruct them to start filling it out. They’ll then need to send their filled-in timesheets to you on a regular basis. The reason why this step is the most important one in spreadsheet time tracking relates to the downsides of the practice. Tracking time in a spreadsheet is a task that’s tedious and repetitive. This makes it prone to errors and various challenges like time theft. Conveniently, these two points are what we’re going to discuss below as part of the limitations of spreadsheet time tracking.

Limitations of Spreadsheet Time Tracking

As mentioned, the two main drawbacks of tracking time in a spreadsheet are:

• Repetitiveness
• Susceptibility to errors
• Higher risk of time theft

Repetitiveness

Filling out spreadsheets manually is a tedious task. It’s also time-consuming, as your staff will need to do it quite often. This will take away time from more important things that contribute directly to the growth of your business.

Susceptibility to errors

A manual time tracking spreadsheet is not only repetitive and tedious but also prone to errors. If you use a shared timesheet for your entire team, employees could even mistakenly tamper with their coworkers' time entries.

Higher risk of time theft

While your staff may log their time entries incorrectly by accident, they could also do so on purpose. This practice is called time theft and will cost your business quite a lot in the long run in payroll spending. Check out our blog article on preventing time theft to learn more about the topic.

Why You Should Use Time Tracking Software Instead

While tracking time in a spreadsheet can help you get a glimpse of time tracking benefits—dedicated apps will help you take full advantage of them. Here’s just a small selection of capabilities that a high-quality time tracker like WebWork will provide you with:

• Automatic time tracking
• Integrations with third-party tools
• Activity tracking

Automatic time tracking

One of the biggest advantages of time tracking software is that you can automate it. As an example, enabling automatic time tracking in WebWork is as simple as turning on “Autorun” in the settings of the desktop time tracker. This transforms time tracking from a tedious and repetitive task to one your staff won’t have to think about anymore. In addition to freeing up time across the entirety of your team, automatic time tracking will also provide you with higher accuracy.

Integrations with other productivity tools

If you’re interested in time tracking, you’re likely using other productivity tools in your business as well. Integrating these with spreadsheet time tracking is possible, but it’s a tedious process—much like tracking time in spreadsheets itself. Dedicated time tracking apps, on the other hand, offer a much more streamlined approach. Besides built-in time tracking integrations, apps like WebWork allow you to set up automations with thousands of apps through platforms like Zapier.

Track more than just time

The last benefit of time tracking software that we’ll discuss is also one of the biggest. High-quality trackers can do much more than just track time: they can help you manage your team more effectively than ever. You’ll be able to streamline your management work through project and task management, productivity monitoring, activity tracking, leave management, and more.