Three Ways to Ensure Up-to-date Timesheets

Timesheets are a pain. Whether you’re a worker-bee who hates filling them out, or a manager who hates having to track down the people who haven’t filled them out – unless correctly managed, timesheets end up being time-consuming.  The ideal would be to have work automatically recorded when it happens. Clockwork Automated Time Tracking & Timesheets offers a couple of ways to do that, and when that doesn’t happen, we’ve now made it easier for you to prompt team members to update their timesheets.

Live Time Tracking in Jira

The best way to ensure that timesheets are up to date is to capture time worked when it happens. Clockwork allows you to implement automatic time tracking that starts the clock when an issue with an assignee and is transitioned to an active status (you can customize which statuses are considered active) and stops the clock when the issue becomes unassigned or is transitioned to an inactive status. The user doesn’t have to do anything. Their time is tracked automatically, ensuring that the data needed – for payroll, reports, planning –  is always available.

An alternative to automatic time tracking is to start and stop a timer on an issue. Effort from the user is minimal – one click when they start working on a Jira issue and one click when they stop. The worklog is produced with the user, issue and time already populated. Other fields such as descriptions and worklog attributes can be filled in as needed.

Both of those solutions mean that your timesheets stay up to date without extra effort from users. That’s terrific. (You’d probably rather have your team spend their time working than filling out timesheets). But live time tracking doesn’t work for everyone. Some people, and some teams, prefer the more hands-on approach of creating worklogs.  Here again, Clockwork has your back with a new feature that lets you easily send reminders to team members who haven’t logged their time.

🆕 Timesheet Reminders

Manually created worklogs great, as long as people remember to do them.  

But sometimes they don’t.

Clockwork to the rescue. We’ve just released a new feature which allows you to identify users who have not logged the expected amount of work hours, and email them a reminder that their timesheets is due directly from Clockwork. Here’s how it works:

• Use the Users filter to select whose hours you would like to check.
• Click on the Outliers filter to identify users who logged fewer daily/weekly hours than expected as indicated by their Working Hours. (You can also click on the Compare time reported button to compare actual hours to expected working hours.

• Click on the Email button.
  
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• A popup will open where you can modify the email text and review the list of users who  will receive the email. Click Send Emails to confirm.
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Getting the Most Value from your Timesheet Reports

Live time tracking and reminder notifications are great ways to ensure that your timesheets perform their most basic and important function – tracking hours worked so your teams get paid. But if that’s all you’re using your timesheets for, you’re missing out on opportunities to do you work better. A good time tracking tool will:

• Improve project plans and forecasting by allowing you to make better estimations, and review estimates vs actuals
• Make invoicing easy by allowing you to easily track billable hours, clients and projects
• Allow you to hone in on productivity gaps by seeing where the time goes

If you’re ready to get more out of your time tracking,  you can schedule a demo or start a free trial of Clockwork for Jira. It’s about time.

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