Project Time Tracking: How Much Time Did Project X Take?

The short answer

Project hours tracking does not need a report builder. To find out how long a project took, you need the project picked in the right place and a date range.

If the screen stays empty, that is the date range: Reports shows nothing until you choose one.

The rest of this guide is about trusting that number. How to set up time tracking by project so the hours land in the right place, who gets to see them, how to split the total by person and by kind of work, and how to carry it into Excel.

Set up a project so the hours land in the right place

A project time tracker is only as good as its project list, and the list rests on one rule: make a project for everything you will ever want a total for. If someone might ask “how long did the Customer Portal take?”, the Customer Portal is a project. If the question is “how much time do we spend in meetings, across everything?”, meetings are a task type.

A project is created in a short form, by whoever administers the organization:

• Name. What people will pick in the timer. Use the name everyone already says out loud, such as “Customer Portal” or “Q4 Audit.”
• Team. Required. The team decides who can see the project and track time on it (more on that below).
• Task Types. Choose the kinds of work that apply, such as Design, Development, Testing and Meetings. The timer offers only these for the project, and it asks for one before it will start, so give every project at least one.
• Description. Optional, up to 1,000 characters. A good home for the scope, the owner and the estimate, so they sit next to the hours.

Who logs time on a project, and who can see the total

A project belongs to one team, and that team is the crew. The members and the lead of the team see the project in their timer and can log time on it. To put someone on the project, add them to the team. A person can be on more than one team, so a developer can be on both the Customer Portal crew and the Brand Refresh crew.

If the people on a project come from different departments, do not bend your org chart to fit. Make a team named after the project’s crew and put the right people in it.

Who can read the hours is a separate question, and it decides who is able to answer “how long did it take?”:

• Admins see the whole organization.
• A team lead sees their own entries and, for the projects of the teams they lead, the entries of every member.
• Everyone else sees their own entries and nobody else’s.

The practical consequence for a project manager: make them the lead of the project’s team. Without that, they can run a project and still be unable to see its hours.

What the total includes, and what it leaves out

Total Working Hours is a plain sum, so it helps to know exactly what goes into it.

• Entries that started in your date range. An entry counts on the day it started, so a late session that runs past midnight belongs to the day it began.
• Finished entries only. A timer that is still running is not in the total until it is stopped. Stop open timers before you pull month-end numbers, or the total will come up short.
• Every page of results. The Pages setting changes how many rows you see at once, not what the total covers. The count beside it, such as “(6 entries),” tells you how many entries it adds up.
• Only what you are allowed to see. Two people can open the same report and get different totals if their roles show them different entries.
• Corrections. If someone fixes an entry, the total follows the next time you press Go.

From the total to each person and each kind of work

Reports filters by date, person, project and task type, and every combination ends in the same total row. So each question you might ask is a different set of filters:

Each run of Go answers one row of that table. When you need all of them at once, such as every person’s share of a project, run the report once and let Excel do the splitting.

Related Building software? See software development time tracking for teams.

Take it into Excel

Export to Excel sits above the filters on Reports. It exports exactly what the filters select, from every page of the results and not only the one on screen. Each row is one entry: Project, Task Type, User, Start, End, Duration and Description. A final row, Total Working Hours, adds up the Duration column.

Duration is a real time value, formatted as hours and minutes. That means Excel can add it up, and a total past 24 hours keeps counting as hours instead of rolling into days. Two ways to get everyone’s share from one export:

• A formula. With User in column C and Duration in column F, =SUMIF(C:C,"Priya Nair",F:F) returns her hours. Format the cell as [h]:mm:ss so a total past 24 hours reads as hours.
• A pivot table. Put User in the rows and the sum of Duration in the values, and you get every person in one go. Give the values the same [h]:mm:ss format.

Entries with a timer still running show N/A in Duration and are left out of the sums, which is one more reason to stop open timers before you export.

An example: the Customer Portal in October

Here is how it looks in practice. First the Reports screen, filtered to the Customer Portal for 1 to 31 October. It lists six entries and the total underneath.

That total, 23 hours, is the answer to “how long did the Customer Portal take in October?” Exported to Excel, the same rows give each person’s share with one formula per name, as above:

For project managers

If you run projects rather than write the code for them, the useful number is not the total at the end. It is the total while there is still time to act on it. A rhythm that works:

1. Get access first. Ask for the lead role on the project’s team so Reports shows you everyone’s entries on it.
2. Write the estimate down. Put it in the project’s description, for example “Estimate: 120 hours,” so it sits beside the actuals.
3. Check weekly. Filter the project from its first day to today, read the total, and compare it with the estimate and with where the calendar says you should be.
4. Look at the mix. Add a task type to the filter. Is testing getting any of the hours? Are meetings eating more than you planned?
5. Export for the people who ask. Send the Excel file, or the one number from it, to whoever wants the actuals.

Time Tracker Software HQ is project time tracking software, not a planning tool: it records the actual hours. Estimates, budgets and progress stay in whatever you plan with, and the hours from Reports are the actuals you set beside them.

Mistakes that skew the number

• A catch-all project. “General” and “Misc” swallow hours that belong to real projects. If you need a home for internal work, call it what it is, such as “Internal and admin,” and keep an eye on its size.
• A project for every task. A project is something you would report on. Give each ticket its own and the timer’s project list turns into a haystack. For ongoing support work, a few standing projects work better, as the guide to help desk time tracking explains.
• The wrong team on the project. People can only log on projects of their own teams. If someone cannot find the project in their timer, check the team first.
• Deleting a finished project. Its entries stop appearing in Reports and in exports. Leave finished projects where they are.
• Comparing totals from different date ranges. A number for “October” and a number for “since the kick-off” are not the same question. Say which range you used.
• Pulling the total with timers still running. Open entries are left out, so the number comes up short. Stop them first.
• Treating hours as a verdict on a person. The hours show where effort went. They do not show who is good, and people stop logging honestly once they feel scored.

Frequently asked questions