Smart timesheets get more detailed

Timesheets - they're a necessary evil for professionals the world over. At Accelo, we do everything we can to make them painless through smarts and automation - we automatically bring in your client emails and calendar entries to make it as easy as possible.

However, when we unveiled the Timesheet Entry screen last year, we didn't realize we'd made it a bit too easy.

By presenting a grid with each row reserved for a client, ticket, task or other work and letting you fill in the hours, we wanted to make it easy to go through and enter your hours, but this created a problem for our clients who need to provide a bit more detail to their customers about who did what, when.

After spending some time reviewing how people were using the Timesheet - we've implemented a new, optional time entry mode to ensure those extra details can be captured without sacrificing much in terms of speed and ease of use.

Detailed Time Entry Mode

Once enabled, when you click on a cell to log time, you'll always get the pop-up so you can see & edit the default Work Log subject & description:

In this new detailed mode, there's actually 2 options for how the Subject and Description fields can work:

• Detailed (Optional): as shown above, where Subject & Description are more like place-holder text. If left untouched, we'll save the work-log with that text, otherwise you can just click to edit it.
• Detailed (Required): this forces the user to always type something in the Subject & Description fields - much like a standard "Create Activity" process.

For those wanting to access other activity-related fields, just click the More worklog details link to add extra details - this is especially handy for folks who also have to log their start and end times (such as US Federal Govt Contractors):

• Class - let's you select the activity class, which can be helpful for categorizing time as internal admin, sales preparation, customer service, and so on.
• Start/End Time - helpful for consultants or contractors who need to record precisely when they were onsite with the customer or engaged in a client task.
• Tasks selector (which only applies when tasks are available for the milestone/sale/issue/etc that you're working on) - besides letting you toggle the Work Log to another task, you can update the task status and estimated time remaining with ease!

Configuring the new Timesheet Entry Modes

As an administrator user, open the Admin navigation > Activities & Emails > Settings, and look for the Timesheet Entry Mode:

To use the new detailed mode, select either the 2nd or 3rd radio option, depending on whether you need to force users to always enter a specific subject & description when logging work.

Below that you'll see an Override Timesheet option. By default this is unchecked, which means the Mode you've selected above will apply to all users. When the override is enabled, it allows each user to choose their preferred Timesheet Entry Mode via their Settings & Preferences screen.

Coming next

Another feature we've seen requested quite a lot: Being able to easily edit/update an activity within the Timesheet - such as the Subject, Class and possibly the day it was logged for.