hours available. Our employees contracted hours are typically 7.5 hours per day. I would like to track the utilisation of the time across the 7.5 hours to identify spare capacity we could schedule to help other teams.
I would also like to be able to report on this as hours helping other teams would result in some internal billing of time.
I have played around and think Monday might be a good fit, but have come across a few challenges.
Not sure how I can produce an indicator of time used against contracted time. Iām not very good with the calculations.
Not sure the best setup for recording the tasks. I was thinking in a timesheet format coding to project/task, but I then have the problem of how do I make the timesheet reusable each week/month.
In an ideal situation, I would like to achieve something similar to Harvest which tracks time well.
Thank you for posting! Iām sure monday.com can work for your needs and happy to help figure out the best setup for your workflow!
You can use a formula column to deduct the actual time worked from the contracted time column values. It would be best for me to see a screenshot of your current setup or as far as you have got, so I can advise on the best formula. This article is a great starting point.
We are also about to change our chart view to allow for multiple column values on the X axis which I think would be a great way to see actual time worked vs contracted time in a more visual representation. To see the capabilities so far, check this article out.
Regarding task tracking, can you give a bit more information on what these tasks look like? Are they recurring tasks which they do every week/month or are you just worried about the layout of task lists per time period?
Have you checked the time tracking column? If not, hereās the article about that.
Any more info you can provide will help us to come up with a great solution for you
Thank you for reaching out to help. Iāve attached a screenshot for you to see the work so far, everything is experimental and flexible for now.
The tasks will not be reoccurring but we will want to be able to view working time worked against the tasks and also a sum of the users time across a day/week/month against contracted hours to allow us to identify where we are not fully utilising a resource. typical 7.5 hours capacity vs actual work logged etc.
I think the board youāve added above is how to track the tasks the team are working on within a specific period of time. It looks fine - One suggestion, have you considered changing the group names to periods of time like weeks, two weekly iterations or months? You could then just add more groups each time period and add new tasks into the group, keeping the structure the same and not needing new boards each time? You will then also have a good history on one board.
In terms of seeing the time tracked per person per period of time, you should check out the time tracking widget in the dashboards - article here.
I think you need another board which will show the number of days each team member worked within a period of time, assuming they donāt work every day?
How about having a board for each month? Each group can represent a person and then list all of the days they worked in that month as items, with a date column showing the date worked, and a numbers column which shows 7.5 hours per day worked?
You can then use a numbers widget per person to total the number of hours worked for the month which you can display on the dashboard against the time tracked within that month?
Let me know if you want more help visualizing this?
Iāve given this a try and I can see how this could work. I think what I need to understand now is how to express the time worked in number format. This would then hopefully let me display actual hours versus capacity and for me to show spare capacity. I guess I want to be able to perform calculations from time worked, Iām just not sure how to do that.
So my boss is trying to understand capacity. Heās thinking to get a dashboard of everyone, he is asking everyone to have their own board, with all the projects they are working on and time estimates. He ultimately wants to see who needs help, and focus the energy on specific projects, instead of getting drawn to comeuppances. There must be a better way for him to see who has too much. Because if everyone has separate boards, where do the project updates live? I looked at the answers here, but these are really tracking time as itās used, rather than projected time.
Ultimately, I think everyone should be able to engage with a project, estimating the time they will spend. Then on my bossās dashboard, he should be able to see totals by person? How do we do that?
Have you checked out āWorkloadā view and widget in the dashboard? The latter I think would work best for your manager. You can read more about it here.
Are you on the Pro or Enterprise plan? These are the plans that have access to this feature.
Hi Julia,
This is a feature weād love to utilize however weāre running into an issue with the number of boards you can link to a widget.
For our use case we have each project set up as itās own board and PMās assigned to the various tasks associated with that project.
At any given point a PM may have 30-50+ active projects.
Is there any way to increase this limit?
The number of boards connecting to dashboard widgets is determined by your plan. Youāre on the Pro plan which means youāre limited to 10 boards. I am messaging you now in private about this.
Hi Steve - did you ever figure this out? Iām really desperate to get this working, its a basic concept which doesnāt seem to have a clear answer on Monday.com - How do i compare time taken to complete a task (time tracking col) against time contracted/estimated. @Julia-monday.com - iād love help on this as itās key for us.
@Julia-monday.com - My company also has a similar need. For example, if an employee spends fifteen minutes on a task, and a different employee spends another fifteen minutes on the same task, we would like to somehow link two timesheet entries to that one task and then to be able to report that thirty minutes were spent between the two employees.
Is there something we can do to have that functionality?
You can have 2 employees track time on the same ātime trackingā column. Depending on how your boards are set up this would be possible. We use high level boards for projects and low level boards for individual to-do lists. So the employees would need to update all time tracking in the high level board along with anyone else working on said project.
You mentioned: āYou can have 2 employees track time on the same ātime trackingā column. Depending on how your boards are set up this would be possible. We use high level boards for projects and low level boards for individual to-do lists. So the employees would need to update all time tracking in the high level board along with anyone else working on said project.ā
Iām trying to track the hours for multiple people responsible for that one line item/task. How would you suggest I do this? how can multiple people track their time for one line item? letās say they are all working on it at the same time and perhaps Josh worked 15 min, Alicja worked 10 minutes, and John worked on the item for 30min but perhaps they all started at the same time.
Basically what Iām hoping to do is create an automation, where when someone selects in progress, then time tracker starts. And, when the status column changes to something else, the time tracker stops.
Any other solutions for time tracking where I have multiple people would be helpful.
What about multiple time tracking columns, one for each person? (I think) you can use a formula column to add up all the time tracking columns to get a total of everyoneās time spent.
In my head, this would work by having a different status column + time tracking column that are linked together for each person(with automation to start and stop based on status). If this gets to be ātoo muchā visually you can create different filtered views so each person only sees their status + time tracking column. You can achieve this by hiding certain views from certain users, and the manager would have a view that they can see ALL of their columnās
basically I had the employee change the status to āin progressā to start the time tracker. When we looked at the log for hours, my name showed up not theirs.
Are you the one the task is assigned to on Monday? You may need to link the time tracking column to the correct āpersonā column for it to work right. Thatās my only thought, otherwise I donāt know why it would do that
Did changing the status trigger an automation that you built? I think thatās what may be happening, you are being ācreditedā as starting the time because you built the automation rule.
any ideas on how I can keep the automation to reduce the number of clicks and have the time tracker start. Or any suggestions on how I could better set this up?
Hi @jkaras - Whatās interesting (and occasionally frustrating) about the Time Tracking column is that it only registers as changing when it turns on, or off. So, what you might be able to do is reverse your thinking:
See if you can get what you want by having your team click on the Time Tracking instead of changing status, and then automate the status changes with Custom Automations. Perhaps something like this:
When (Time Tracking column) changes AND status is (whatever applies), change status to āIn Progressā
When (Time Tracking column) changes AND status is In Progress, change status to āStoppedā
Disclaimer - I havenāt fully tested this, but theoretically it should work because the Time Tracking column doesnāt āchangeā as it counts up. Only when it starts or stops.
and happy to help figure out the best setup for your workflow!
