Use the Outlook Calendar for TimeSheet Reporting

If time management is a critical aspect of project management, managing appointments and schedules forms an equally important part of time management. The tool that is used by most employees in any business organization today to schedule appointments and meetings, as well as to manage other personal and business information is Microsoft Outlook and Outlook calendar, in particular.

TimeSheet Reporting in Your Outlook Calendar

Most organizations today also use timesheets in order to determine what the client billing has to be, for employee payroll calculations and to have better control over projects, both internal and customer projects. There is constant effort on part of these organizations to come up with sophisticated software that will help them manage the timesheets better, for software that will help calculate payrolls more accurately leading to lesser disputes and for software that will help them better forecast project time and costs. Very often, they neglect the fact that the Outlook calendar together with TimeSheet Reporter gives them the perfect platform from which to generate timesheets and to monitor projects.

Microsoft Outlook calendar provides a very neat set of tools that can be used to manage your day, week, even months every efficiently. Further, if you would like to break down a task you are working on, into different activities, you can use Outlook to schedule when you should be working, on what activity. In fact, a large number of employees in companies the world over are using these features to keep track of the tasks they are working on and to ensure timely delivery of their projects.

In many organizations, the problem employees face is that every time they complete a task they have to log into a different timesheet reporting system to enter the time. If employees are working on multiple projects, they will not always remember to enter the time as soon as a task is done, resulting in the logging of wrong number of hours.

What is needed is a tool that would use the simplicity of the Outlook calendar and build on it, allowing employees to use it as a timesheet reporting interface. TimeSheet Reporter does exactly that – it leverages the existing infrastructure and makes it easy for employees to submit timesheets directly through the Outlook calendar.

With the help of TimeSheet Reporter, staff and management can continue using Outlook calendar as before to schedule meetings or tasks. Once they are done with the appointment, they do not need to go to a different application to enter the time taken but simply submit the timesheet from their Outlook calendar.
Thus, project workers do not have to keep in mind how much time they have spent on each individual project – TimeSheet Reporter allows them to do all that directly from their Outlook calendar. Further, it also allows them to add extra comments or information for each task so that supervisors can approve of the timesheets more easily. Finally, management can also understand from the timesheets generated and the information provided as to what task took how long to complete and why.