Collaborator time tracking

I have people working for me as contractors, I thought I could just use Wrike' time tracking for them to allocate time to a task however collaborators can't.

I don't want them to have the "External User" rights as I don't want them to be able to create/edit or more importantly be able to delete tasks. I need them to only have the Collaborator rights + Time tracking

Find more posts tagged with

On hold

Status: On hold

Comments

Michael Priest

I agree with Andrew. We use collaborator licenses as internal resources that performs work on specific tasks. We don't want them to add tasks and other functions, but we do need to know how much time they spent on spent on a task for project performance as well as future planning. I would like to request that the time tracking feature be opened up to Collaborators.

Graham Mead

I also agree - we have just kicked off a project with a very high % of external resources - without the time tracking facility it now means we now have to create a cumbersome work around to capture there working hours against each task! - it would be a great improvement to add this functionality for Collaborators

Permanently deleted user

I can see how this would be a useful feature and I'll be sure to pass it on to our Product Team and redirect other users looking for something similar.

@Andrew, I understand you don't want to add these people as External Users due to the rights that user will have however it's worth mention that combined with Limited Folder/Project permissions this may be an option you might consider. 'Limited' means that the External User can only view tasks, make comments, add attachments and change Status. If this interests you, I'm happy to discuss further 👍

Thanks to everyone for your votes and comments here 🙌

Marcus Azevedo

I agree too, and even made the same suggestion before Stephen tell me Andrew already posted here. Have my vote!

Stefan Wacker

Need it for our non-conformance Report. We handle it with wrike. We need the time tracking to capture the time of rework.

Matt Herrington

I have multiple clients who want to use Wrike, some even buying 2 accounts, to log hours for all their contractors, and are unwilling to make external contractors users in their account (and dont want to pay to upgrade the subscription of wrike). Being able to make collaborators able to log hours would be fantastic.

Gianluca Gori

Fully agree, time tracking is essential also for collaborators - completing a task without having the visibility of what that meant in terms of effort brings no value for planning of similar tasks as well as to make sure collaborators are more in control of how they allocate their time. On top of that, when evaluating the total time of hours allocated to a project, makes little sense not including the time spent by collaborators - making the evaluation very unreliable.

Please open the possibility to add "hours spent" also to collaborators.

Gianluca Gori

I'd also like to mention that it would also be great to have the "timelog category" functionality for collaborators - essential to maintain uniformity across user types for analyzing project efforts.

Tomasz Klicki

I also think that time tracking for collaborators would be great idea!

Julie Smith

This would be so helpful if our collaborators could track time!!!

Permanently deleted user

Hi guys, just to keep you updated. There are no immediate plans to change the permissions for this license type. However, the team is thinking through options to control more of what External Users can and cannot do.

I'll be sure to update you here when I have more information about this idea. Thanks for the continued votes and input - as always use-cases are super helpful to fully understand this need and workarounds you have help not only our team but others on Community 🙌

Gianluca Gori

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the update, but I still cannot get it that a collaborator (no matter if it's an external consultant or colleague) has to be made project manager only to record worked time.

He or she will never plan a project, create custom fields, adjust plans on the gantt, creare reports or dashboards, organize the project tree, look at other PMs work or plan, manage accounts, etc etc.. so I see no real reason except a purely commercial justification not to let collaborators input time spent.

Now, I understand commercial impact, but I don't think it's a good approach for your customers - doesn't help customer retention and overall customer satisfaction. Long term, does not pay in my opinion.

I really hope you'll rethink about your position on this very important subject.

Thank you.

Gianluca

Rakesh Kakkar

It is not feasible to record time of multiple collaborators with various tasks by Project Manager. Task assignee should have privilege to record his/her time spent on task.

I think this is the basic requirement and Wrike Team should think of it for incorporation under Collaborator license.

Thank you

Rakesh Kakkar

Grant Peterson

Stephen,

I can totally see the reason why collaborators do not get time tracking, as that is one of the premier features included in Wrike. To the point of the other users, I wonder if there could be another paid tier that includes the time tracking but not necessarily the other features. That way, the value add can get Wrike what they need(cash) but those who need time tracking don't have to pay for a full license. With this new tier (Collaborator+ or something like that), I envision the same rights granted to Collaborator, but with time tracking. Pricing would be something like $3 per month. That way it is economically justifiable by the users, and hopefully a boon to Wrike as well.

Let me know what you think!

Respectfully Yours,

Grant Peterson

Al Sape

Hi, big plus 1 for this from me as well! External users can actually add time tracked via manual addition, so they can basically provide their time. But the Time Tracker is a great feature and it's really a shame you guys don't allow the guests to simply turn it on and off. It would really help some of the headache of trying to keep tabs on contractors and making sure they write in their hours.

Thanks!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi everyone, thanks a lot for your support for the suggested feature! I checked with the team and for now, it's not on the product roadmap. I understand that his might be disappointing for you, but please rest assured that we'll continue to pass on your feedback and we'll make sure to let you know if anything changes in regards to this suggestion!

Thank you again!

Al Sape

@Elizaveta Bogdanova, are you willing to share if this is more of a Pricing decision? With the current huge change in the dynamic of remote work in the economy, there is an increased focus I think on the potential of using Contractors within teams at all levels. Teams have found solutions just in the past few weeks to rework how they define their entire workflows, workloads, capacity, etc. using remote help that may very well be in the form of contract workers or part-time positions.

If you are on a higher-level Wrike plan with addons like Integrate, Marketers, etc, adding additional users is a huge cost. So it's almost counterintuitive that as a "higher-tier" client, you get penalized by Wrike's pricing structure if you want time tracking for all your team, including contractors. Because the difference between the price of a seat that has this function at a barebones Business-level plan with a Discount, and a full-featured plan with addons, is significant. And in the case of tracking time, you'd be forced to add in a contractor full seat at the price of each seat with all the addons, or lose the benefit of time tracking for some key personnel that will be taking part in projects, consuming budget, etc.

To be precise for the benefit of the community, the difference could be:

Business plan with discount, let's say ~$20/users. So add a user that can track time - extra $20.

Same plan with Resource, Marketer, Integrate - potentially $60 + per seat. So hire a contractor you'd like to have track time, you are now paying this much, or more, to get that capability when you probably only need outside time tracking the collaborator rights for that user.

I would appreciate knowing if you guys have a philosophical approach that is that you want these type of users to be "full" seats and thus clients will need to plan to pay for them if they want them to track time, and that's just the cost a client will have to absorb, period. This is very key in my decision making about continuing with Wrike vs. other tools that let free guests track time.

Thanks!

Permanently deleted user

Hey everyone, we wanted to share an update from the Product team in relation to this idea.

We can appreciate the feedback here and desire for a feature like this to be implemented into the product. This suggestion is being researched as part of a plan to implement custom account roles within Wrike, but this is not on the Product roadmap for the foreseeable future.

We regularly check with our Product team for updates, so if there are any developments or changes concerning this suggestion, I'll be sure to pass it on.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Benjamin Johnstone

I also need

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for reaching out @Benjamin Johnstone!

Al Sape

Wanted to jump in here again as this is a huge need of mine and I'm currently thinking of coming back to Wrike after quitting last year. Would like to shout out to @Gianluca Gori for the great comments above, I really don't understand in this age of remote why Wrike wouldn't want to do this. ClickUp DOES let guests track time for free, and I would imagine you guys are going to lose users to them for this very reason - I'm potentially one of them. Wrike has a ton of upside vs. ClickUp in Project Mgmt, like your Gantt, but they may catch up, and given their growth pace, Asana's improved speed these days and continued emphasis on good communication, enhanced with today's release of increased Messaging capabilities, which you guys also lack, I really think you should start to address the easier requests on this forum. I can see where things like Convert a Task to a Project may be hard to move along as there are technical challenges, but how hard could it be for you to let guests track time? Even if you charged say $3/month for the privilege per @Grant Peterson? It just seems greedy and shortsighted, especially in the age of remote work, to have this limitation.

And sadly, despite a good number of votes here, the last update we have is from May, 9 months ago!

I'll continue to hope you guys will step up and see the real potential of this feature. In the meantime I am stuck trying to figure out how to get my contractors the benefit of some real nice resource mgmt and workload features in Wrike. Because those are not features I need for my managerial types, who are the only ones with licenses to actually access them!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Welcome back to the forums @Al Sape 👋 Thank you for bumping this thread; I'm checking with the team now to see if there's an update from them. I'll let you know here if there is 👍

Andrew McAllister

@Al Sape we are actually already considering moving to ClickUp for this very reason, along with a number of others.

Wrike seems to have really lost focus on its customers, too busy creating overly complicated add-ons for corporates rather than making the core features work well (as well as being over-priced vs competitors). Wrike needs to remember those small companies become big companies, and if they don't look after the smaller clients they won't be their big clients later. It creates an opportunity for a competitor to erode its market share from below.

I say this as a 10year+ Wrike user, who has tried in vain many times to submit feedback to improve the product and has lost confidence in the company, and is now being forced to find another solution.

Christina Fischer

As an enterprise account, we do appreciate a recent focus on scalability of certain features.

However, we also rely on core capabilities enabling our collaborators to track time tracking or use dashboards. Additionally, we rely on other core features, and would love to see them expanded and matured, for example the capability to duplicate reports, cascade custom field values, or include custom field values in the search.

Al Sape

More great points here after my post...really hope you guys think about this. As I mentioned in an earlier post, if I want to add on something like Wrike Analyze, I'll be paying for a contractor who I'm sourcing from Upwork to do one off content or software dev work and may be gone in a month, to also have use of Analyze, even though he/she will never know it exists! And in Clickup I pay nothing!

What on Earth is the rationale behind not doing this guys? It would really be nice if you could explain that for once, instead of just saying "we'll pass to the product team," in other words, we don't want to be transparent with our community and we don't respect you enough to actually tell you that, because we feed you the same line again and again about passing the buck back to Product...whoever that happens to be, but practically never actually explain why "Product" won't address the older, highly-supported by frustrated users, needed feature requests here, including all the ones that @Christina Fischer just raised above.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

@Andrew McAllister @Christina Fischer @Al Sape Thank you for sharing more feedback here! The team has plans to address collaborator time tracking this year; the plans aren't formalized yet, so I'm hoping to let you know more by the end of Q1.

Dario Dursi

I totally agree! I think it's a very important feature to add in wrike.

Elaine McDonagh

Thanks for adding your feedback here @Dario Dursi and welcome to the Community 🙂

As Lisa mentioned above, we'll keep you posted on this one 👍

Diane Jolley

Hello - has there been any update on the collaborator license type being able to use time tracking?

Cansu Yetisgin

Hello @everyone, thanks again to all of you who's been supporting this suggestion and sharing your feedback in relation to this suggestion. Our Product team has started the research on the possibility to introduce Collaborator time tracking!

Therefore, we're changing the status to "Investigating" for this thread. We'll be sure to update you here as soon as we have more information from the team 🙋🏻‍♀️