Better time tracking and reporting | Voters

Better time tracking and reporting

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Rena O'Brien

I've added this a couple of times, but as the team continues to use Clickup, there is a lot of items missing in tracking and forecasting.

I've tried all the widgets but ideally this is what I need: for any given month (and possibly other time frames):

a list of projects containing how much time was logged on that project by assignee or resource
a list of resources containing how much time they logged on each project they worked on

March 2, 2021

Bugra Oktay

Pinned

Hello everyone - we are working on a number of time tracking and reporting updates. You'll start seeing improvements in February. I'll make posts here about all the big and small things we ship.

Claire Cockle

Having a live team activity page or dashboard would be so useful to see who is working on what right now

ARon Hayut

Good morning,
I noticed that the real-time time tracking feature is now working.
When an employee clicks Play on a task, I can enter their profile and see which task they are currently working on.
This is definitely a good improvement in the system.
However, in order to see what each employee is doing, I currently need to enter each user separately, which makes the monitoring process less efficient.
What I would like to have is:
A central view (Dashboard / Table / Panel) where I can see in real time what all employees are currently working on.
In other words, a single screen where I can see something like:
Employee	Active Task	Project / List	Time Running
Employee 1	Social post design	Client X	00:23
Employee 2	Landing page build	Client Y	01:10
Employee 3	Paid campaign management	Client Z	00:05
The goal is to enable quick live monitoring of the entire team, without needing to enter each employee profile individually.
Regarding the UI, I don’t have a strict preference.
It could be implemented as:
A table
A dashboard widget
A “Live Activity” panel
Or any other interface that you think makes sense
The main idea is to have one screen that shows in real time who is currently working and on which task.
If there is already an existing feature that can provide this, I would be happy if you could point me to it.
If not, perhaps we could develop a small extension that displays this information.
Thank you!

Tom Watts

Hallo, I use timesheet tracking extensively for my teams and have a couple of sticking points that feel like they should be simple to fix (I can get an excel to do it...but not CU).

For reporting purposes:

individuals in my team track daily hours against tasks per project (these are open ended without a start/end date as people insert the time directly into the time sheet - not stop/starting a timer. Specific timings are hard to manage given the fluid nature of our work)
the timesheet can track hours per task, per project, per day. People submit these for approval weekly
I have assigned custom fields against tasks so i can filter them by client time/ internal time / other
However, when it comes to reporting I can see the total cumulative hours an individual has tracked against these custom fields...but I am unable to cut this across specific dates. Even though in the timesheet view, hours are clearly inserted on specific days. I can only cut by dates if tasks have start/end dates. for weekly reporting across 40-50 tasks this is unmanageable after 2 weeks.

Can this be looked into please?

Oksana Day

We are patiently waiting for the screenshot feature so we can drop Clokify and fully move to Clickup. Bugra Oktay any hopeful update on this?

אלעד גבור

Thank you very much for your investment in this matter.I would be very happy if you could also invest in enabling work hours reporting on a task through the Chrome extension.What I find missing in the extension is that it’s not possible to select a task or see from where the task comes.In other words, there is a task detail, but without context about which list or project the task belongs to.This makes it hard to understand which project the task is related to, since the list name is actually the project name we are working on.If my explanation is not clear, I would be happy to write in more detail or even record a short video.

Bugra Oktay

Improvement update:

Search in timesheet's "Add task" picker is MUCH more accurate and reliable now. Give it a try and let me know if it helps locating your tasks there.

A quick way to add all of your assigned tasks to your timesheets is also on its way out. Stay tuned.

Ricardo Brandão

Bugra Oktay Any ETA on Screenshot Monitoring like Time Doctor?

Hannah Zachry

Okie - I'm a team of one! This is my Time Tracking dashboard, and a quarterly / annual review dashboard.

I just need to know what to hire for, and when. I would also use this information for pricing!

Bugra Oktay

Question for everyone here:

What are your most frequently utilized time tracking dashboard charts in ClickUp currently? Please tell me about the card types, measures, axes, filters, or any other detail that are important to mention.

Even though I'm also interested in (and actively filling) gaps in time reporting in general, this question is about understanding the presently useful ones.

Cynthia Avila

Bugra Oktay the time tracking cards we find the most value in are "Time Reporting" and "Time Tracked". We then filter these cars by custom fields to slice and dice how time was spent. We have multiple users track time to a singular task (without all being assigned to it) so its really difficult to use custom pie and bar charts as there isn't a way to filter by user who tracked time, So we use the time reporting and time tracked with filters, it removes the visual component that we would really like to utilize soon!

Jeff Kemp

Bugra Oktay almost exclusively use the Time Reporting card. We filter on location for client project folders and lists, and and then time period, group by Folder or List then Task. We also use Time Cards sometimes. What is missing is things like utilization against allocated project hours (i.e. by folder or list by month), and sometimes we can't easy determine the underlying tasks or drill into the tasks depending on the view.

Jon Rowand

Bugra Oktay we also almost exclusively use the time Reporting card. I'll try to carve out time to go back and look at feedback for improvements, a quick request to please make the text of the time numbers highlightable and copyable again. This is the sum time tracked at the top grouping level when looking at the card before expanding to the second level. We lost this functionality I want to say about 4-5 weeks ago. This has caused us a significant amount of operational inefficiencies for us.

Interestingly, the second groups still does allow for highlighting and copying, but that is not useful for us. Here's a screenshot:

Tobias Naumer

Bugra Oktay we currently use external time tracking tools such as https://clockify.me/ or https://www.clockin.eu/en and I think you can copy a lot of them to make it as clear as possible. 
This is probably more important for us in Europe; overtime accounts are also. In other words, how many hours per month were voted on via an employment contract and how many hours did the employees also accrue in addition or below? Exactly the same applies to projects: How many hours are planned according to the offer and how many of them have been used up so far. Preferably also for each phase of pre-planning, fulfillment, post-planning, etc. 
That we simply see exactly who still has how many overtime or minus hours, and of course also in the direction of vacation planning, remaining vacation days, etc. 
When moving towards projects, it is always important to have different levels for evaluations. Depending on how fussy the customer is, the time reports are more superficial and sometimes more detailed. Mostly by customers, projects, phases, employees, calendar weeks and individual tasks.
Hope that helps to make it even more useful:)

Niklas Buschner

Bugra Oktay I have multiple calculation cards to track the average time spent per assignee on tasks filtered by a custom field (work category dropdown). we do this for tasks done in the last 7, 30 and 90 days. this is not flexible at all, so having average time tracked available in a bar chart to see it dynamically for all available assignees would be a massive value add. also seeing averages develop over time would be massively useful.

Nicola Graves

Bugra Oktay The actual export of the timesheet data needs to be in an hour, minute formate to eaisly analyse the data, the current formats cannot be easily converted to time, we have to build a separate column to fix that

Jeremy

Bugra Oktay Today, I need to export the data to Excel to rework it in a table in order to get an overview of the expected/actual workload per person and/or per label (billing vs. non-billing, production vs. training, etc.).

Ideally, I would like to be able to combine this with the projected workload view, as it already provides an accurate overview of the workload (percentage, gauge, easily applicable filter).

Courtney Newman

Bugra Oktay I actually don't find the dashboarding very valuable inside Clickup because I cannot get down to the granular level I need based on custom fields, spaces, etc. I have a basic time tracked based on period card set up, which I dump into Excel to be able to build the reporting I need.

Wim Delfs

Bugra Oktay  in larger organizations, one of the main limitations we experience in the current dashboards is that reporting is mainly focused on individuals rather than teams. For management and portfolio oversight, we often need to report on team capacity and effort per project, not just per person. Being able to aggregate time tracking and estimates by team would make dashboards significantly more useful for leadership reporting.
Another challenge is related to estimates and planning visibility over time. Currently, the only place where we can reliably see estimates distributed correctly across months is in the Workload view, where hours are shown per month based on the scheduled work. However, Workload is not designed as a reporting tool.
For reporting to stakeholders, we need to be able to show planned hours per month, per quarter, and per project, ideally in charts and dashboards. While Workload gives a visual overview, it is not sufficient for presenting planning data to a wider audience. Proper reporting with charts would be much more useful.
What we are also missing entirely is time tracking reporting aggregated by month or quarter. At the moment, we cannot represent this properly in dashboards.
For people who might think this is already possible with current dashboard charts: estimates are displayed in the month of their start date. If an estimate starts in January, all estimated hours are attributed to January, even if the work is planned across multiple months. This makes the charts inaccurate for planning and capacity reporting.
Better time-based distribution of estimates and time tracking in dashboards would make reporting far more useful for organizations managing multiple teams and projects.

Stephanie Usis

Bugra Oktay Like a lot of folks here, time tracking cards are the most useful with the current functionality. However, Bar Charts would be far more useful to us, if we were able to visualize multiple data sets side by side.

For example, in the charts below, I'm able to see Time Tracked by each assignee for a project using a tag filter (thank you for adding this!). Then I have a seperate chart to show what the Time Estimates were for each assignee on this same project. It would be remarkably helpful to be able to see the Time Estimates and Time Tracked in the same graph.

James

Bugra Oktay, time spent per month, Vs allocated. This is really important for us, we can get the information, but really difficult. Being able to see a bar chart of all time spent per month, vs the estimated/allocated time, would help as we run a lot of retainers, and this is how we track how many client hours we have used or not per list.

Julian Pustkuchen

Bugra Oktay We're mostly using "Time tracked" and "Billable" report. Besides what the others mentioned here (and what other providers already implement), a missing key point for us is the ability to filter on NOT having tags. Currently you can only use HAVING tags. With NOT having tags filter (which is also missing in the API, see dedicated frequest), we'd be able to create more workarounds.
But the root cause is even more important: Since years you have "Billable", but no "Billed" option. So until now we still have to use a "Billed" tag, but have no way to filter out the unbilled ones (billable, but NOT HAVING "Billed" tag).
So adding a "Billed" functionality would be great.
Another thing that would help a lot, is "Time tracking types" (like task types), which would give us the flexibility to have different kinds of time tracking, e.g. time tracking for billing vs. presence tracking.
Budgets are the next, more advanced topic, but out of scope here, I think... having the requested NOT HAVING TAG filters would improve reports a lot.

Zach Beattie

Being able to run a visual line/bar/pie chart by assignees and custom fields over time has been a long time dream for our team.

We pretty consistently find there are reports we're trying to run where the Time Estimate field is an option but Time Tracked is not.

Bugra Oktay

Zach Beattie: We are working on adding "time tracked" to those cards. You will see it soon.

Niklas Buschner

Bugra Oktay my COO would love that (and me too obviously)

John Catherall

Please look at Timely as an example of Time Tracking done right. It's like Toggl, but on steroids. 
It auto-monitors your browser and PC (though it's privacy-centric at it's core). As a result there is no need to start/stop timers (forgetting etc) and then you can literally just assign the work to relevant projects or tasks individually or en masse. Means people can assign as they go or at the end of the day. Whilst you can assign time to certain projects or clients you can also 'tag' it, and the reporting function gives multiple ways of reporting.  The AI is pretty accurate for prompting as to what should be assigned where.
For example: Say I'm working on social media, and I'm doing a mix of things throughout the day. I can assign the work to the client, the project, but also 'tag' the type of work, e.g. engagement, content creation, etc. I can then report on any combination of those things and more. 
e.g. Client A's engagement-related work over the  last 3 weeks by employee A.
or
All Clients this month Content Creation related work.
It's super powerful and flexible. The only thing I feel it lacks is real-time reporting with a permalink that a client can access whenever they want. Instead, you have to generate snapshots at any given time that you can share as opposed to truly live reporting.
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Rounding has been mentioned a few times, and if you're a VA, OBM, and many other similar occupations / teams, the ability to round up / down to the nearest xx is super important.
I find reporting with many time-logging systems useless if they cannot easily share it in multiple formats and have the ability to control who sees what. Ideally live linking, but also PDF, CSV etc

Bugra Oktay

John Catherall: Thank you for the detailed feedback. I'll check out Timely and see how we can improve our time tracking capabilities based on those insights.

Rounding options in time tracking is something we are actively looking into.

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