Spreadsheet Time Tracking: How to Do It and Alternatives

If the first tools that come to your mind for time-tracking purposes are the almighty spreadsheets, I get it.

It’s no wonder that Excel or Google Sheets are your go-to choice. Everybody reverts to them for a quick CRM, task manager, or even an invoicing system until they hit the limits of what a spreadsheet can really do.

The problem is that spreadsheet time tracking is flawed and inconvenient. But let’s keep it positive—I’ll guide you through a step-by-step guide on spreadsheet time tracking, its downsides, some free timesheet templates, and an automated time tracker as an alternative.

Key takeaways:

• For an effective time-tracking spreadsheet, structure is essential. Carefully design it with proper date fields, project columns, task descriptions, and duration calculations to serve as the backbone of your tracking system.
• Built-in features save time, so use the automatic duration calculation, time formatting, and ready-made templates to simplify your workflow without adding complicated formulas.
• Spreadsheets appear “free,” but they bring hidden costs, including admin overheads and lost billable hours. All these costs exceed the subscription cost of dedicated tracking tools within the first 2-3 months of use.
• A time-tracking app offers immediate value as it requires minimal setup time and offers time savings that offset subscription costs overall.

Looking for an automated and effective time tracking alternative to Excel?

Discover how EARLY eliminates manual time tracking hassles with AI-powered time tracking, automatic reports, overtime calculation, comprehensive leave management, and seamless integrations.

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Spreadsheet time tracking explained

Spreadsheet time tracking involves using tools like Excel or Google Sheets to record, monitor, and analyze the time spent on tasks, projects, or clients. At its most basic, it involves manually entering start and end times or total hours worked in some cells organized by date, project, and activity.

While the concept hasn’t changed dramatically since the early days of Excel, spreadsheet time tracking has grown considerably. Excel time tracking, for example, includes advanced formulas, conditional formatting, pivot tables, and even macro automation that turns simple time logs into powerful analytics.

Typically, these are the types of entities that benefit from spreadsheet time tracking, and you might be among them:

• Small businesses with tight budgets, as well as service teams with time-tracking requirements;
• Freelancers that need time tracking data in a simple but correct format;
• Organizations with Excel-centric workflows.

If you’re one of these stakeholders, you could be looking to track employee hours in a monthly template to have an overview of employee productivity or just project time tracking to identify time input versus monetary gains. At the same time, your objective can be to understand fluctuations in profits based on the daily hours worked or simply to bill clients based on your weekly timesheet template.

💡 Pro Tip: As a side note, I’m a fan of AI-powered time trackers, but you might be just like one of my fellow freelance designers who told me that Excel time tracking gives him good control over his data and exactly the information he needs for invoicing. That might be your case, too, so let’s explore if Excel offers accurate time tracking.

Spreadsheet time tracking: Step-by-step

Regardless of the reason you’re diligently tracking time and understanding how many hours worked you captured with your spreadsheets, you first need to be familiar with the process of time tracking in Excel timesheets.

Here’s a process on how to fill out a timesheet and create it:

1. Design your time-tracking template

Start with a clear structure that includes the essential elements that work as the backbone of a time tracker. Create drop-down lists with labeled fields:

• Date fields: Use proper date formatting so you can easily sort and calculate;
• Project/Client columns: Categorize time entries for reporting employee work hours;
• Task description: Detail the specific activities performed in a notes/comment field. Note: The purpose of this label is not for employee monitoring but for project identification;
• Start/End times: This helps with precise period tracking and displays data in your reports on a specific timeline;
• Duration calculation: Use formulas to correct format automatically and generate the total hours worked;
• Billable status: Flag whether time is billable or non-billable to clients;
• Rate information: Include hourly rates for financial calculations;
• Tags/Categories: Add metadata for deeper analysis on any type of indicator you need to dive deeper into.

2. Use Excel’s built-in time-tracking features to simplify your workflow

Excel and other spreadsheets incorporate built-in formulas that help you calculate hours worked with more ease. If you’re not a fan of formulas, I get you; I’m just the same.

Let’s explore some shortcuts for your time tracker spreadsheet:

1. Automatic duration calculation
   • Enter start and end times in adjacent cells
   • Select the cell where you want the duration to appear
   • In Excel, click the “Time” category in the functions library
   • Choose “Duration between” or use the function wizard to select DATEDIF
   • Select your start and end time cells
2. Using Excel’s duration format
   • After calculating a time difference, right-click the cell
   • Select “Format cells” → “Custom” → “[h]:mm” to display hours and minutes
3. Ready-made templates
   • Excel includes several pre-built time-tracking templates that you can access easily
   • Access them via File → New → search for “timesheet” or “time tracking”
   • These templates include all necessary formulas and formatting

Sample timesheet using built-in features

Hopefully, you have tried the above shortcuts. If not, I’m explaining these in a table:

3. Add data validation and protection

Manual timesheets are prone to error, so you need to make sure you’re simplifying the process but also protecting the data. This way, your employees spend little to no time filling them out, and you’ll benefit from accurate data on a monthly basis.

• Create drop-down lists so that you have consistent project names and task categories.
• Time format validation: This is so that your team keeps the hours worked accurately and prevents invalid time entries.
• Cell protection: Lock formula cells to prevent accidental or non-accidental changes.
• Input validation rules: Set reasonable limits on duration entries for all the rows.

4. Create dashboard visualizations

To reap the benefits of time tracking in spreadsheets, you need to transform the raw data into actionable insights. Hence, you’ll need to create dashboards to visualize the time spent on specific tasks in the following ways:

• Summary tables: These tables take the shape of pivot tables, and you’re essentially aggregating time by various dimensions. If you’re like me, after the initial jumpscare that you need to build such a table, go search on YouTube for a 3-minute tutorial, and your pivot table is done.
• Time distribution charts: These are those colorful pie and bar charts you generally see in different spreadsheets. Drop a quick chart on your dashboard, and suddenly, it becomes clearer that “quick client emails” are somehow eating 30% of your workweek. Who knew?
• Billable vs. non-billable hours chart: The chart that answers the eternal freelancer question: “Where did all my billable hours go?” A stacked bar comparing billable versus non-billable time often delivers that uncomfortable “aha” moment when you realize your admin tasks are secretly your biggest client.

5. Add a layer of automation

It’s widely known that these types of spreadsheets need a lot of manual operations, so you need to squeeze out as much automation as possible. Check these options:

• Auto-fill formulas: Turn your data into a table (just press Ctrl+T in Excel), and your formulas will copy themselves to new rows automatically. This way, you won’t need to copy and paste formulas when you add new time entries!
• Conditional formatting: Make your spreadsheet highlights important things for you. Set up simple color rules to show when you’re working overtime, missing time entries, or approaching deadlines. Find this under “Conditional Formatting” in both Excel and Google Sheets.
• Scheduled refreshes: Get your reports to update themselves regularly. In Excel, use Power Query to refresh your data on a schedule. In Google Sheets, set up simple time triggers with Apps Script. This way, your dashboards always show real-time tracking data without you having to manually update them.
• Template generation: Create one perfect timesheet template with all your formulas and formatting. Then, use it to make fresh timesheets for each new period. Save it as a template in Excel (under “Save As”) or make a copy in Google Sheets. For even less work, set up automatic generation of new timesheets at the start of each month with all the dates already filled in.

💡 Pro Tip: Does designing your time tracking spreadsheet from scratch sound complicated? We made a comprehensive article with free timesheet templates, from a monthly timesheet template to a project template and others. Here’s a preview of them:

The problems with spreadsheet time tracking

Though it might seem handy, spreadsheet time tracking is time-consuming, as it involves too many puzzle pieces, and if one step of the process is missing, then you can’t have a final picture. Creating the system and maintaining it while keeping everyone accountable for filling it in is a lot of manual work.

Even if you use multiple employee timesheets in your time-tracking, you’ll stumble upon lots of challenges:

1. Spreadsheets are not scalable: As your business and team expand, you may find that spreadsheets are outgrown, too. Once you get past several employees or a volume of data, high chances are that you’ll struggle with the biweekly timesheet template. Managing and accurately analyzing total hours of work across all the columns becomes increasingly frustrating and time-wasting. The need to constantly update the template and the slowdown in performance with larger data volumes make it inefficient.
2. Spreadsheets can’t be automated: Excel, as well as Google Sheets, lack features such as automatic stop-start timers or tracking work for its users in the background automatically while they perform their tasks, which makes spreadsheets disliked by teams.
3. Spreadsheets are error-prone: Manual data entry, as many stakeholders use it, comes with a high likelihood of errors. For example, only if one user changes by mistake a currency symbol, your client billing will be messed.
4. Spreadsheets have limited reporting capabilities: As mentioned above, spreadsheets lack sophisticated reporting capabilities and makes it difficult to gain insights into productivity or efficiency at a glance.
5. Spreadsheets don’t show you real-time data: As Excel, for example, isn’t inherently a collaboration tool, timesheets are filled in and collected at specific times, which does not offer a bird’s-eye view of the current state of a project or task. Often, this obstructs quick decision-making and increases frustration.
6. Spreadsheets don’t offer security and data integrity: The spreadsheet files are prone to corruption, loss, or even unauthorized access. 

💡 Pro Tip: To calculate work hours in a semi-manual way, try a free Time Card Calculator.

Create a free EARLY account

Ditch chasing Excel timesheets and turn time tracking into a task so easy that your team will even enjoy

Try EARLY for free

EARLY vs Excel: head-to-head comparison

Even if you’re defaulting to an Excel file or Google spreadsheets out of familiarity, specialized time-tracking apps come with significant advantages. In order to exemplify the differences between manual and automatic time-tracking options, I’ll make a comparison between the two.

EARLY: the fully automated time-tracking tool

EARLY turns time tracking from a chore into second nature, which, with its simplicity, helps your team stay consistent in the process of tracking time.

Here’s what EARLY brings in the time-tracking process:

• Multiple time tracking methods, including AI-generated time entries, automatic time tracking, and a cool physical time tracker for those who prefer tactile tracking.
• EARLY’s automatic system learns your work patterns and automatically captures app and tool usage and website visits so that you never forget what you’ve worked on but capture every single minute in your timesheets.
• A minimalist, intuitive interface that helps reduce human error and makes time tracking enjoyable, as opposed to columns and cells in spreadsheets.
• Significantly higher accuracy in real-time, as you can analyze project progress and keep track of employee hours on the fly while informing critical project management decisions. On the opposite spectrum, in Excel, you’d have to share a template with your team, remind them to fill out the timesheets, and wait for it to be completed even for weeks.
• Done for you reports and insights due to its customizable time reporting system. In contrast to Excel, EARLY generates detailed project reports in no time, so you can drive growth and make smarter, faster decisions.
• One-click billable hours capture, so you can bill clients accurately, as well as get fair compensation for your work. No more formulas to calculate the pay rate for your employees based on the hours worked, as you will have a visual representation of it.
• Simplified leave and work hours management where you track regular hours, PTO, and all types of leaves in one simple leave tracker, eliminating the need for separate spreadsheets or manual calculations when you’re planning team capacity.
• Automatic overtime tracking. Set standard work hours for each team member once, and EARLY intelligently tracks both overtime hours as well as shortfall hours based on your predefined rules. Then, it sends you reports ready to be sent for payroll.

Read here about some of EARLY’s integrations:

• Google Calendar time tracking integration
• Slack time tracking integration
• Time tracking in Notion

Choose your time-tracking method

While spreadsheets are a familiar default for time tracking, they are, in essence, a false economy for growing teams and businesses. The transition from spreadsheet-based tracking to a purpose-built solution like EARLY isn’t merely about adopting new technology, but it’s about transforming how your organization values and manages its most finite resource: time.

EARLY’s ability to automate the tedious aspects of time tracking while delivering deeper insights creates a virtuous cycle: less time spent tracking time means more time available for productive work, which in turn generates more accurate data for future planning.

Create a free EARLY account

Ditch chasing Excel timesheets and turn time tracking into a task so easy that your team will even enjoy

Try EARLY for free