They did not work for us and we’ve consulted with many companies that have come to the same conclusion. What we thinkĪlthough spreadsheets might make sense at first, they don’t work as a long term solution. Each pain point will be magnified by each new person or project coming in through the door, and you’ll get bogged down trying to keep up with it all. If you find your company is growing - hiring more people and taking on more projects, spreadsheets are not going to scale at all. Is there one sheet per employee? One per project? How do you accumulate several years of data? Trying to organize time tracking data for every employee and project within these confines has its challenges. Spreadsheets do not scaleĪ spreadsheet is essentially a series of data points along two axes and a collection of macros. To pull more meaningful conclusions from your data you are going to need something more powerful than a spreadsheet. The resulting reports and graphs may look good, but, they will be lacking intelligence. You might also install some add-ons, but, your data will have to be in the right format to make them work. You could build custom reports using the built in capabilities that come with your spreadsheet software, but, that’s going to take a long time to set up. While spreadsheets are great for tracking data and can be formatted in an infinite number of ways, getting useful information from them has its limits. Be prepared to spend more time than you might think keeping the spreadsheet current and free from errors. Sharing the spreadsheet on Google or OneDrive so that people could update it themselves would certainly have made this process less cumbersome, but not enough to stick with it in the long run. It was a time consuming and laborious process that was prone to error, especially as we grew. Each person on the team would submit their time to the project manager, who would then enter the time into Excel. There was a season in our company’s history when we kept time records in an Excel spreadsheet. Drawbacks Spreadsheets are time consuming Because you are recording the raw time tracking data, you have a lot of options in how that data is structured. You aren’t stuck within the confines of a vendor’s database structure or their set of tools. And, you can reorganize the data any time. Spreadsheets empower you to format time tracking data in a way that makes the most sense to you. As long as you keep current by updating time tracking data at the end of each day, you’ll find that entering time into a spreadsheet is a relatively painless process. Once you’ve labeled the columns and rows, entering time goes quickly. It doesn’t take much to get started tracking time with spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are so universal that getting started with one makes a lot of sense, because most people already know how to work with them. Services like Google will include version histories, so you can see who updated what and when, and roll back changes if needed. And, you can easily share spreadsheets with other people at your company. Each spreadsheet software has the same basic set of features that you need to track time. It really doesn’t matter if you are using Excel, Calc, or Google. If you are thinking of tracking time using a spreadsheet, here are some the benefits and disadvantages to consider before you get started. But, we have over a decade of experience consulting with companies that do. Since developing our own time tracking software, Intervals, we no longer use spreadsheets. Of all the different methods we’ve tried, tracking time with spreadsheets was the most time consuming, but also the most versatile method, which may explain why so many companies continue to use them today. Since our company’s inception we’ve tried paper timesheets, spreadsheets, open source software, and web-based software. We’ve been tracking our time one way or another for the last 21 years.
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