Time is one of the most important yet limited resources available to a company. Using your team’s time effectively can make or break your project’s delivery and profitability.

For businesses that charge customers on the basis of time, tracking of time spent and generating timesheet reports to invoice them is a vital ability. Using Rocketlane, you can track time spent on project tasks, activities, submit timesheets for approval, and even specify billable vs non-billable hours - a useful analysis for service providers.

Let's take a look at how you can set up the time tracking feature for Rocketlane.

How to Enable Time Tracking for your Rocketlane Account

1. Click on your profile icon from the left navigation bar and go to Settings.
   
   
   
2. Select Time tracking.
   
   
   
3. Click on the toggle button to enable Time tracking for your Rocketlane account.
   
   
   
4. Once you have successfully enabled time tracking, you can configure the settings for it.
   
   

Configuring Time Tracking Settings for your Rocketlane Account

• Timesheet due on every: Set up a due date and time for your team's weekly timesheet submission
  
  
  
  
• Send Reminders: Use the Send Reminders option to send reminders to your team to submit their timesheets.
  
  
  
  
• Track time against: Track time across different stages of your project. For instance, you can track time after completion of each task in the project and nudge your team members to submit timesheets to track time.
• Team members can only report time for: Enableyour team members to track time solely on the projects they are involved in, and choose the project status for which your team can track time and submit timesheets.

  
  

• Lock time entries: Users are not permitted to withdraw, change, or resubmit their timesheets after approval if the "Lock time entries once approved" option is enabled. This does not apply to admins.
  
  
• Lock timesheets upto the selected date: 
  • Team members won't be able to change their reported time; 
  • Only admins will be able to change time entries that were made on or before the lock date. 
  • Approvers can change approve/reject status on or after the lock date. 
  • You can select the lock date by clicking on the 'Set lock date' option.
    
    
    
• Calendar Integration: Enable calendar integration to connect and see calendar events on the timesheet and populate relevant information.
  
  
  
  
• Hours to be reported: Using this option, you can limit the total number of hours that can be tracked in a timesheet. If necessary, you can drill down to the precise number of hours that must be reported in a timesheet or just set restrictions for the minimum or maximum number of hours to be reported.
  
  
  
  
  
• Time Entry Categories: Categories help you classify the type of work your team spends their time on. Your team members can choose the category while adding their time entries.
  
  
  
  
• Approval Settings: Approval Settings allows you to add an account-level setting where project owners or managers (timesheet approvers) can also approve timesheets for users. Admins will always be able to view all timesheets.
  
  
  
  
• Timesheet Exclusion: You can create an exclusion list for team members who are not required to submit time. They will not recieve submission reminders and also their time will not be counted towards team capacity.
  
  

Assigning Default Values to Activities

Rocketlane now lets you assign default values to predefined activities, making time tracking simpler and more consistent for your team.

How to Assign Default Values

1. Navigate to Settings → Time Tracking.
2. Define default values for your predefined activities in the activities section.

Note: Non-project activities cannot be marked as billable. Time entries will automatically populate with the default values you’ve set when tasks or activities are predefined.

Changing Project and Work Options in Time Entries

Rocketlane provides the flexibility to update the project and work options for existing time entries, ensuring adaptability for evolving tasks and projects. To do this:

1. Open the time entry you want to edit.
2. Update the project or work option based on the configurations set in Settings → Time Tracking.

Note: You cannot update the project or work option if the task, phase, or milestone linked to the time entry has been deleted, or if the time entry has already been approved. Work options can also be updated directly from the single-user view, allowing team members to manage their time entries easily.

Rejected Hours in Time Tracking

1. Navigate to Settings → Time Tracking.
2. Locate the Rejected Hours setting.
3. Toggle it on to activate the feature.

• Project Tracked Hours - Rejected hours will no longer count towards the total tracked hours for the project.
• Project Billable and Non-Billable Hours - Any rejected time entries are excluded from both billable and non-billable hour calculations.
• Project Revenue Calculations:
  • Time and Material: Revenue will not be calculated for rejected time entries.
  • Fixed Fee: Tracked hours-based revenue recognition methods will exclude rejected time entries from revenue calculations.
  • Subscription: Tracked hours-based revenue recognition methods will not account for rejected time entries.

Note: This does not apply to custom revenue recognition methods, which will continue to follow the filters you’ve set.

• Project Costs - Rejected hours are ignored when calculating project costs.
• Team Member Utilization - Rejected time entries are excluded from utilization metrics, ensuring accurate calculations of how team members’ time is being used.
• Team Member Analytics - Rejected hours are excluded from individual team member analytics, providing accurate insights into their contributions.
• Utilization Reports - Utilization percentages ignore the rejected time entries, when providing resource efficiency reports.

Hey! Here's hoping that this support document is useful. You can write to us at [email protected] with any queries.