Overview
Spira's new timesheets functionality lets users track how much time they have spent on incidents and tasks across all their products. They can record time against each artifact for a given day in the current week. This time data is used to update the effort recorded against each artifact as well as being available to report on by specific date. Users can also easily see timesheets from the past and make changes as needed. This new functionality is a giant leap forward from the previous Timecard page that let users record time only against the artifact itself, with no record of the specific date or timecard being retained.
Accessing Timesheets
Users can access the timesheet functionality by going to the My Page icon on the top-left of the application, then clicking on the My Timesheet entry in the sub-header.
Alternatively, the My Timesheet menu entry is always available directly from the user profile dropdown menu:
Regardless of which route is taken, the menu entries will take the current users to their specific My Timesheet page. This page will be initially blank, showing just the current week, with the current day highlighted in orange:
Entering Effort/Time Spent on the Timesheet
Once you are on the Timesheet page, you can choose the artifact to add to the weekly timesheet by using the dropdown menu. This will list all of the tasks and incidents that are currently assigned to you.
Once you have added the artifacts to the timesheet, you can enter in the numbers of hours (and minutes) spent each day on that specific task or incident:
When you click the Save button, the timesheet and individual time entries will be recorded in the system. The timesheet will update to show you the total time logged per-day and per-artifact.
You can edit the timesheet by simply clicking on a cell and making the appropriate edits. To view or modify a previous timesheet, you simply use the navigation arrows next to the current date. They will let you move backwards and forwards one week at a time.
Viewing the Actual Effort on the Artifacts
The time saved on the timesheet pages is also visible on the artifacts themselves. For example, if you view one of the tasks from the timesheet, you will see the Actual Effort field that records the time logged:
Note that the actual effort (time logged) is not related directly to the % complete or the time remaining. Those values need to be entered separately because the % complete is calculated from the remaining effort.
To see the history of time logged against the artifact by each timesheet, you can simply click on the History tab for the artifact in question:
Where you have multiple timesheets reporting time, they will be shown as individual history entries:
Reporting on the Timesheet Data
Once the timesheets have been logged and submitted, a key need is the ability to report on the timesheets and time entries logged. To make this easy, we have added new reportable entities that will let you create and run custom reports that pull the timesheet data, as well as the data related to the associated artifacts. We have some sample custom reports available to get you started in the support Knowledge Base:
The sample report can also be run in an Excel format for convenient data extract:
What's Coming Next?
As part of our product roadmap, the following timesheet related features will be coming in the next versions of Spira:
- Timesheet statuses that will let you submit draft timesheets and then track if they are approved or rejected
- The ability to review, reject and approve timesheets, with a completely new time/resource management page
Where Can I Learn More?
- For more details on all of the new features, enhancements and bug-fixes in Spira v8.5, please refer to the release notes.
- For comprehensive documentation on the new Timesheet functionality, please refer to the Timesheet section of SpiraDocs.