Sharing timesheets

jb@59069

I'm pulling my hair out as to some of the limitations of Smartsheet. Due to these various limitations, I have created a timesheet with Form for each of our clients. I have created an individual Sight for each of our employees and contractors. I have created a link to each clients Form using the "?Employee/Contractor=Firstname%20Lastname" suffix on the URL. This meets the needs of our people being able to add time based solely on their contribution to each client. These are all fed into the individual client timesheet.

What I need is to have each employee/contractor have the ability to edit/view their own entries in the timesheet, in order to:

1) Edit any time entry(ies) where they may have forgotten to select "Billable?" checkbox, change the "Charge Description/Code", edit the "Task", etc.

2) In the case of contractors, print out their total entries for the previous 2 weeks, to attach with their invoice to us.

Additionally, I need to have a second copy of this sheet with various formulas that can break down totals based on "Project/Event", "Charge Description/Codes", "Project ID", or whatever the client(s) require our company to provide for invoicing.

No dynamic dropdown linking, no column linking to other sheets, apparently no ability to filter sheet data based on specific criteria that is lockable. We should be able to filter data on a sheet so that we can share sheets with certain users and have only the desired data show to that user.

How do I accomplish these seemingly simple tasks in Smartsheet?

Schiff A.

Hello,

Based on the scenario you've described, I recommend a solution that uses Reports that take advantage of the "Current User" option as a field criteria.

The "Current User" criteria can be used in a Contact type field to filter reports based on the current logged in user. This allows you to create reports that only include information specific to that user. Here is a similar example that uses this feature to use a single report to show each member of a team only their assigned tasks: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/529454-viewing-your-assigned-tasks

To implement this in your process, you can do the following:

First, set up your sheet to be filterable by the Current User

1. Edit your sheet to include the "Created by" system column

2. Edit the form for that sheet to only be accessible by users who are logged in

When a logged in user fills out a Form, the Created By field will be populated with their user information

 

Second, create a report that filters for the current user

1. Create a report that includes all your relevant criteria. Include in the Who? section, the Created By column with "Current User" as the criteria.

2. Set the "When" criteria to only include the previous 2 weeks of entries (you may wish to create a separate report for employees and contractors).





More information about creating reports can be found here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/522214-creating-reports





Finally, add your calculations to the original sheet

Since your employees and contractors will only be modifying items in the report that are applicable to them, they will not need to edit the sheet directly.





You may also wish to consider taking advantage of our Consulting team for more in depth solutions: https://www.smartsheet.com/consulting



Thanks for using Smartsheet!



Schiff

Smartsheet Technical Support

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Schiff A.

Hi jb@59069,



You are correct that a user will need to be shared to an underlying sheet in order to view that information on the report.



Depending on how you are working with the underlying sheets, one workaround would be to hide all columns (or any relevant columns) on the underlying sheet and only unhide the columns if you need to work directly on the sheet. 

This would not hide data on the report but would prevent people from viewing the data on the sheet itself. So long as a user is an editor or below, they will not be able to unhide the columns on the original sheet: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/1155182-sharing-permission-levels



I'll submit an enhacnement request on your behalf to let our product team know that customers are interested in the ability to have reports display information even if an underlying sheet is not shared.

You can always give our product team feedback by clicking "Submit Product Enhancement Request" in the Quick Links section of the right-side pane when in the community.

Here is a direct link for your convenience: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form?EQBCT=739aa75f30ca43a8a22eb53e4da7d409)



 

Thanks,

Schiff

Andrée Starå

HI,

Just be aware that they are able to export to Google Sheet or Excel and that they then can unhide the columns and see the information. So if it's sensitive information i wouldn't recommend it.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée