Track time in Resource Management by task, not by project overall

Stephanie Simard

Is this possible? Am I missing something obvious? It seems in Resource Management we can only track time to the project and not to individual tasks within the project.

I'm trying to solve an issue for a team within our org and they actually came to us after finding a preview of the Time & Expenses feature in RM, which fulfills the timesheet-like solution they're looking for. This team completes audits of our offices and wants to track individual resources' time per office location. So we have one project sheet per resource, with a list of each of their audits for the year as tasks (plus the start/end dates and allocation we need to connect it to Resource Management).

Once connected, when each resource goes to Time & Expenses in RM, they can only confirm or enter their time for the entire project overall. We've tried both the hours and minutes and the itemized settings in our RM account. It seems the only way someone could track their hours per audit/office location in a week is to add in notes, or to add categories to our account for every audit/task (nope). But those notes won't produce audit (task-specific) reports, correct?

This team does not want to add every single audit as a new separate sheet - that's time consuming and not necessary, since they don't track any progress in Smartsheet. These resources want to complete a simple time sheet-looking feature where they enter hours for each audit (each task).

Genevieve P.

Hi @Stephanie Simard

It is not possible right now to track time against individual tasks in Resource Management. Time can currently be tracked against projects, phases, and at a more granular level - categories, as you've found.  

You can break time entries down with notes in day view for a given day. Both categories and notes show up in the approvals as well as reports. However, if you want to group data in reports, you cannot group by notes (but you can group by category).

Please submit your feature request to the Product team by creating an Idea Post in the Smartsheet Product Feedback and Ideas topic here in the Community. This will allow other users to vote on your enhancement idea!

Thank you,

Genevieve

François Cales

Hello,

I have exactly the same question while I am using bridge/integration between smartsheet and RM.

On one side operational following up project with several tasks per resource, on the other side, following up workload plan, where days are charged, ...

I seems that Smartsheet cannot automatically create phases (correct ?), so I cannot follow up on which task resource has worked.

Do you have solution until we have this functionality ?

Thanks

Genevieve P.

Hi @François Cales (and @Stephanie Simard!)

Resource Management released a new feature called Capacity View just last week - would this work for you?

https://www.smartsheet.com/content-center/product-news/resource-management/new-capacity-view-experience-resource-management

Cheers,

Genevieve

Matt Suderman

This is a serious limitation.

I have clients that want to track time by major deliverable. It's impossible.

Neil Egsgard

When integrating with Smartsheet:

• Smartsheet tracks hours at a task or phase level
• Resource Management tracks at a project level

This discrepancy makes actuals vs budget of much lower value because we can't identify the variance on phases.

Please allow us to integrate phases from Smartsheet to Resource Management.

Neil Egsgard

You can upvote this idea to allow phases to integrate from Smartsheet to Resource Management.

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/110923/link-resource-management-phase-of-a-project-to-data-in-smartsheet

TracyC

Yes please, it is important to be able to input and track daily hours by a team member that would add up all hours spent against a project phase and then to be able to do the same with actuals vs budget per team member per project phase.

AmelieAtInvoka

@Genevieve P. do we know if this is a functionality in the roadmap?

Tony Platts

We were told this feature was available during the sales process. I'm very dissapointed that, now I've paid my money, I find that the functionality doesn't exist, we can't even map activity to phases and can't get information as to if it's going to be looked at.

prime_nathaniel

We get asked this pretty often with RM customers. This functionality is currently only possible via a custom integration. Can be done via bridge or any middleware / integration layer. Takes about 2 weeks to do from scratch. significantly less if you already have the data model, apis, js, etc already written :)

- Phases have to be created via RM API for them to be selectable on time entry in RM

- To get full parity of schedule in SMAR vs RM you cannot use ANY native integration from CC or Side Panel, it must be fully custom API code. This is due to assignable relations being non-mutable in the RM API (ie you can't control or move tasks between phases, they have to be initialized in the RIGHT phase - which means no auto creation - which is flat structure only)

- Tasks level time tracking requires a matching ID between RM and SMAR and must be processed via custom code against the time approval API. This id would need to be added via the notes field.

I should note there is a significant amount of overhead required to make this work as you need project schedule ids, rm ids, user parity, multiple webhooks, etc to monitor and process these on a per project basis.

But this effectively gets you what you probably think the integration should have,

1:1 project > phase > task > subtask hierarchy
Assignment syncing
task level actual hours incurred
task status sync

The main requirement on customer side is the entering of a task ID in notes (not everyone can guarantee the human processes compliance to make this level of granularity possible).