general advice: timekeeping project management set up?

[primuspaul]

I am trying to keep track of time for a small number of workers working on various projects. Basically what I want is to have a "dashboard" that shows me in progress projects and how much time was spent on them so far with the potential for more advanced reports in the future. Data entry to it must also be available to each worker simultaneously, which does not appear to be possible with a single excel file. So what I did was I made a "time sheet" excel file for each worker to input project,start time,end time,statuschange and then I made a main projects file that power query appends each of those files' table to a single table. The table gets the latest (based on date) statuschange entry for each project and use a formula to put it into a calculated status field in that table, so the first few columns of the table are appended tables from those worker excel files and the ones to the right are calculated ones done directly in the table.

Then I run a pivot table on that table and slice the status so I only see non-completed projects.

Is that a good way to do it or is there a better solution? The reason I chose excel is I want something simple and don't want to deal with a complicated time management app online or have to work with a complex MySQL local server.

 

[dmt32]

Hi,

In my working days what we would do for small remote teams is create a workbook for each member to record their time activity.
Each workbook connected to a local database (normally access but sometimes just a master workbook) – this data would then be uploaded weekly to the corporate database where analysis & reporting activity could be completed.

The Time sheets record time spent on each activity daily broken down by

- Staff Name / No

- Department

- Date (week ending)

- Project Code

- Task Code

- Hours

associate with that project -example below

Employee’s personal data, Project & task codes are stored in tables & loaded to their copy from the local database.

I not able to share the application (probably should not have kept a copy) but should be OK just to show you an image of the front end to give you some development ideas.

Hope Helpful

Dave

 

[primuspaul]

This is something you made yourself or from a template?

 

[dmt32]

This is something you made yourself or from a template?

Something developed inhouse circa 30 years ago before days of smartphones - teams needed ability to submit timesheets whilst on client sites but faced restrictions on internet access & what applications clients would allow on their networks - an Excel workbook connected to local database was the main workaround.

Its old hat now but thought may give you some ideas.

Dave