[Best Practices] Let's Discuss Time Tracking! ⏱️

Hello wonderful Community 🙂

Today, let’s talk about tracking time ⏳

Many of you are using time tracking features in Wrike. With our solution, you can track time for yourself and others, edit and lock time entries, use Timelog view and Timesheets, as well as time tracking categories, and create reports based on tracked time.

For those of you who are already using time tracking, it's a popular and widely-used feature. Some of you have even been sharing examples of how you're utilizing it, like in this recent Community thread. Now, let's take this conversation further 🙋

If you have successfully integrated time-tracking information from Wrike into your billing process to trigger invoicing on a set cadence, we would love to hear from you!

Here are a few questions to guide the discussion, but feel free to share any relevant information or tips:

Which software do you integrate with Wrike for time tracking, billing, and reporting?
How did you set up the integration between Wrike and the other software?
What specific benefits have you experienced from this integration?
Were there any challenges you faced during the integration process? How did you overcome them?
Have you been able to automate invoicing based on time-tracking information from Wrike? If so, could you please share how you achieved this?
Is there any advice or best practices you would offer to someone considering a similar integration?

Feel free to share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below. Let's learn from each other! 👇

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Sherrie Besecker

I would love to see what others are doing to integrate timesheets (financial system data) - we are currently working on updating / upgrading our financial system, and we definitely have timesheets / financial integration on our radar for future state within Wrike!

Shelly Erickson

In IT, we currently use Wrike for time tracking and haven't intergrated other solutions.

Mirosław Bożek

We are tracking a lot of tasks and projects. But we are missing customization and filtering in the timesheets. Our employees also report time on site through mobile app and they find the interface hard to operate at this level.

Devree Czupinski

We have optional time tracking on certain tasks then track hours in custom fields at a project level. It would be helpful to also have time tracking at the project level, but other than that, we do not have it integrated with billing.

Kevin Thalacker

We utilize another tracking application, so still need to figure out if Wrike would be better.

Eric Fiero

We don't use Wrike's time tracking at all. It's hard to quantify with what our organization does in this way as many projects overlap. But I have been very curious about how we COULD use it so I'm looking forward to seeing other responses.

Claire Findlay

We are not currently tracking time but plan to implement it soon to better help with understanding productivity. We wont use it for billing.

Kelly Recinos

One of my team members and I are both just starting to play with the timer feature. We track effort in general terms to help with allocation. I would love to see how others are using time tracking as well. I hope to encourage my team to use the timer in the future!

Sven Passinger

We use the time tracking feature of Wrike. But we did not make a direct connection to our finance tools. We are exporting monthly financial data via a self written program using the API. This exports data as we want (layout, table, ...). Finance wants Excelfiles.

For reporting on projects we do the same way. We are then exporting e.g. project proposals as pdf we can give to senior management for approval. As our company wants a written document an approval in Wrike is not possible and we go the way via pdf. This works quiet well as project managers only care about Wrike and the generation of the project proposal is done automatically.

The problem we always have is that the API is not well incorporated to Wrike and sometimes you have commands in the GUI not supported by API. That is always very disappointing as in my understanding a good programming style would first make a back end with API and then use the same API in the GUI (this is how we are programming).

Advise: try very well if Wrike supports the features you need before you decide to make an integration.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Big thanks for your replies here, folks 🤗

Heather Hernandez

I am not using time tracking in Wrike, but it is good to know that it has that ability!

Pietro Poli

Which software do you integrate with Wrike for time tracking, billing, and reporting?

We integrated our time tracking internal software which is integrated with our ERP and billing software (Ad Hoc Revolution by Zucchetti).

How did you set up the integration between Wrike and the other software?

Before we fully understand how our billing software works, it needs a customer, a project and two variables to undersand the center and the voice of each time entry.

Then we prepare our blueprints including these information, inside several folders in a project.

What specific benefits have you experienced from this integration?

We avoid to go to another software to insert time entries and now finally we can compare:

the estimated time for each activity and project
how much we actually spent
how much budget remains on the job

Were there any challenges you faced during the integration process? How did you overcome them?

Certainly, the first difficulty, still ongoing, was that the (very blocked) ERP structure forced us to insert more folders to manage centers and cost items. Right now we are defining how to avoid these two pieces of information and have them deduced based on the role of each individual resource.

Also the difficulty we had was with Wrike's webhooks, which sometimes fail and how to keep the time entries synchronized in case a modification or deletion of them was necessary.

We therefore had to resort to an additional table that kept track of the various movements and logs to complete the integration.

Have you been able to automate invoicing based on time-tracking information from Wrike? If so, could you please share how you achieved this?

Yes, now every relationship we enter goes directly into management.
We still have a manual check, by the PMs to verify that everything is correct (activities that need to be invoiced in addition or not).
In the future, we would like to add the use of categories to timelog entry in Wrike to indicate whether or not the activity is billable or not directly during report entry so as to decrease effort at the end of the month.

Is there any advice or best practices you would offer to someone considering a similar integration?

Make an excellent analysis of the processes and of all the possible unknowns that there could be in the integration.
Get help from a programmer and a third person who validates your idea.
Test with just a few people on the team and get their feedback, tweak your integrations, and roll them out at scale.
Keep track, use the Wrike API to send approvals and comments if something doesn't work as it should.

Try, try, try again....

Elizaveta Bogdanova

@Pietro Poli This is amazing, thank you so much for such a detailed reply 💚

Pieter Koens

It is sometimes hard to track time in Wrike. We did tryout the asset management add-on from the more expensive pack and that allowed us to track time, but normally we write the hours onto a project using Microsoft applications.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

@Pieter Koens It would be interesting to know what challenges you had with time tracking!

Michael Vantsevich

We use automation to detect if a bill/invoice has been sitting in an actionable state (submitted, approved for payment, etc) and then notifies everyone assigned to that task AND actionable state. This prompts a human to review the task and make and necessary changes, like paying the bill and moving it to the Paid / Finished state.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks for sharing @Michael Vantsevich 🙌

Morgini Ramen

The time tracker feature in Wrike is one of most essential features for our team. Every time the team works on a task, they play the timer to log in their time and those are used later for billing and reporting purposes. We do not use any other integrations. We export the data from Wrike to Excel and create reports in Excel files and recently, we started using the Reports feature for better monitoring of time spent. I also use the Timesheets feature to check my weekly timesheets and edit those if necessary. We love it!

Suzanne Carter

For us, time tracking is essential for us as we need to bill all our time on projects. We export the data via a self-written programme which creates a report for our Finance team. We also quote for every job we do so we need to track our time to ensure we are within quote and let the client know if we are going to go over.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Love to hear that the time tracking feature is so helpful for your teams, @Morgini Ramen, @Suzanne Carter 🤩

Jennifer Dudley

We don't integrate our time tracking with another system. We track time on everything so we can predict for future estimates. It would be great if there was a column for task "Status" in time tracking so you could see it at a glance or close it if you forgot to.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks a lot for sharing your use case and feedback @Jennifer Dudley 🙌

David Simmington

Our consultants are tracking time down to 15m increments within various projects on multiple tasks. They too feel we are missing customization and filtering in the timesheets, like someone else mentioned above. One would be breaking out "Project or Folder" into separate columns, or a column specifically to show Project.

We don't have any integrations to other systems in place at this time.

Morgini Ramen

Hi @David Simmington, I have also been encountering the same issue with the timelog view. We would like to analyse times spent per type of task which is available as a custom field in the table view. However, it is impossible to add custom fields in the timelog view. I have asked for a call with our Wrike account manager to discuss possible integrations or improvements to this but I am still waiting for Wrike to get back to me...

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks folks! Our team continues to keep your use cases and feedback here on their radar ✅

Adam McRae

Like many of the comments above, we too need to track our time spent accurately in order to get paid for our work. I run a report at the end of each billing period that gets exported to a sheet filtered by project to generate invoices.

I'd also like to echo both @David Simmington and @Morgini Ramen in that having the ability to better filter and add custom fields to the timesheet view would be extremely valuable. An IC could have 20 tasks across multiple projects and it is difficult to separate them when it's just one list, so filtering by project would help a lot. I've also heard from my team that they would like to be able to see effort and time spent on their timesheet.

Rohan V

Hi @Adam McRae 👋 Thank you for detailing your use case and supporting the suggestion to add custom fields to the timesheet view, as well as an option to see effort and time spent. If there are any updates in the coming months, I'll be sure to let you know. Thanks again!

Matt Gonter

Is anyone using sub-contractors and tracking their time according to a project? How are you handling this?

Adam McRae

We often use contractors and I created a custom user type called 'Contractor' that allows for them to log time in Wrike, while removing access to some more sensitive features. The ability to log time does require allocating one of the seats in your subscription though. We keep a couple of open seats that we float around to contractors as needed.

Matt Gonter

@Adam McRae - I like the custom user type. The issue we run in to is our Contracts keep time in another system and we are trying to get out of the requirement to submit time in two different places.

As much as I would love to have time associated to tasks worked, I think we are goign to have a custom item type called "Contractor Timelog" and have them submit their timesheets via email with a specifically formatted CSV. Then we can use a python script to create the log entries via that CSV.

It gets their time in the system for tracking and reporting. Our PM's will then just close out tasks with no time worked. Until we can get a better solution, this is what I'm thinking of starting with.