How to Set Up Timesheets in Odoo
For any business that sells time or wants to know where its hours go, timesheets are the raw data everything else depends on. Setting them up so they are quick to fill and connected to projects is what makes them work. Continuing this series of practical Odoo how-to guides, here is timesheets.
Connect timesheets to projects and tasks
Timesheets in Odoo record time against projects and tasks, so start by making sure the projects and tasks people work on are set up. When time is logged against real tasks, you get a true picture of what each project and each piece of work actually costs. That connection is the whole value of timesheets.
Make logging time easy
The biggest challenge with timesheets is getting people to actually fill them in. So keep it easy: quick entry, sensible defaults, and the ability to log time as work happens rather than reconstructing the week on Friday. The easier it is, the more accurate the data, and accurate data is the point.
Use timesheets for project costing
Once time is being logged, you can see how many hours a project has consumed and therefore what it is costing in labour. This is what turns a vague sense of whether a project is going well into a real figure. For services businesses, this project costing is often the difference between guessing and knowing your margins.
Connect to billing where relevant
For billable work, timesheets can feed invoicing, so the hours you record become the hours you charge. Setting this up means no billable time slips through unbilled, which is a common and expensive leak. The link from timesheet to invoice is where recorded time turns into revenue.
Watch the reporting
Timesheet data tells you where your hours actually go: which projects, which clients, which kinds of work. Use the reporting to spot where time is being spent well and where it is leaking. For a business whose main cost is people’s time, that visibility is genuinely valuable for pricing and planning.
Practical tips
- Set up projects and tasks so time is logged against real work.
- Make time entry quick so people actually keep timesheets.
- Use timesheet data to see true project costs.
- Connect timesheets to billing so no billable time is lost.
- Use the reporting to see where your hours really go.
My take
Timesheets are only as good as the discipline behind them, so the whole game is making them easy enough that people actually keep them. Do that, connect them to projects and billing, and you get true project costs and fully billed work, which for a services business is transformative. It is humble data that quietly drives profitability.
Next in this series: how to set up your helpdesk.
Based on the official Odoo 19 Timesheets documentation. Want to know your true project costs? Get in touch.