Excel timesheet template vs. automatic time tracking software

Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets might have worked great when your team consisted of five or ten employees. But, once a company nears 20 or 30 workers, the harsh truth becomes apparent - it’s difficult to scale from an Excel sheet.

In other words, Excel is not flexible enough for the fast-changing times that we live in. What if the scope or the direction of a project changes significantly or if time registrations need to be moved or edited? The spreadsheet giant has to give the stage to more advanced and user-friendly solutions that can meet a growing company’s needs for more complex calculations.

Let’s say your company uses an Excel template for time tracking. Each employee has his or her own spreadsheet for time registration with a tab for each week. At the end of the month, work timesheet spreadsheets are typically saved to a company server for data consolidation and invoicing.

Each company does this consolidation in a different way, and many still do it manually or semi-manually. The end result and analyses are generated into a report spreadsheet.

The main question here is this:

Who performs this responsible and time-consuming task?

It’s possible that there’s so much work that you’ve outsourced or even hired someone to manage all the monthly timesheet templates.

A half an hour worth of miscalculation won’t harm your business, right? But what if this mistake happens several times per month for each employee? That can quickly accumulate into tens of hours lost every month. And that CAN harm your business.

Delonix Marketing Corporation is an example of how a company can benefit from introducing automatic time tracking. Before switching to DeskTime, their employees were required to log in when they arrived at work and log off when going on a break. Naturally, people sometimes forgot to do that. Furthermore, the employees could sign in at any time, but that did not mean they were actually working.

Do you love creating visual reports and think that Excel is the best in that?

It’s true that Microsoft Excel was originally developed for advanced reporting features. But nowadays software has advanced even further and time clock apps like DeskTime already prepare handy visual reports for you.

You can easily translate all your tracked data into clear and professional reports that visualize your productivity and profitability. Your management and your customers will definitely appreciate the opportunity to have clear insights on budget spend, task progress, and team activity.

In DeskTime, you can access daily or weekly productivity graphs as well as see the convenient calendar view for the monthly reports with the absent days, start and finish time.

With the pandemic pushing many companies to adopt a remote work model, it can be a difficult switch for teams everywhere.

Unlike employee timesheets, automatic time tracking software like DeskTime runs in the background and tracks not only the hours spent working but also the use of productive and unproductive apps. This allows employers to see where resources go and helps employees boost their efficiency by focusing on meaningful work rather than just tracking time spent in front of the screen.

DeskTime is often used to improve work-life balance, which tends to suffer in remote work scenarios. By tracking their own hours, employees know when exactly the workday is over and it’s time to switch off.

Sure, there are people who can manage Excel to order a pizza for them, but is it worth the time and the intellectual effort put into this business area that can be so easily automated?

The truth is - Microsoft Excel was never designed for efficient time tracking. But don’t be sad - you can still use your Excel for budget calculations, graphing tools, and pivot tables.

But leave the automatic time tracking to DeskTime - it will replace the old school process of manually logging work hours and project costs and will help you and your team focus on your primary tasks.