Microsoft Teams time tracking: best ways to track time

Looking for a reliable time tracking tool for Microsoft Teams? From free options to more trustworthy ones, Timeneye has got you covered.

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication app used by small and big companies from all over the world to better collaborate with colleagues, and organize video meetings, chat, and file storage.

Microsoft Teams is included in the Office 365 subscription, and it features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products such as, for example, Timeneye.

Teams have been thought for professional usage and for this reason, it has a great focus on collaboration. Both project management and time management needs meet in the process of using Teams and it appears logical that a professional suite, such as Microsoft one, needs ways to track time to better help its users to check the time and monitor the employees’ “presence” at work.

In this article, we will see two common approaches to track time on Microsoft Teams, a free software called Time Clock 365, able to help managers to check their employees' attendance at work, and Excel spreadsheets.

We will also compare them to the in-depth and useful features of Timeneye, time tracking software that perfectly integrates with the Microsoft Ecosystem.

Microsoft Teams time tracking with Time Clock 365

Time Clock 365 is a free add-on tool specifically thought for Microsoft Teams.

Time Clock 365 offers a Microsoft Teams time tracking free way to keep track of employees’ shifts, through a friendly and super understandable workspace, since they can use it to clock in, in the morning, and, later on, clock out when they are done working.

In Time Clock dashboard it is possible to clock in the time, by pressing the “punch in” button as soon as the working day starts and, when the working day is over, clock out by pressing “punch out”.

Managers can also know how much time their employees have been spending on a day since Time Clock’s time recording allows them to know their employee time; how much time they spent working until late or when instead, they did not work at all.

Employees and team members can also leave a note to better explain how they have been using their time and make the team or their managers aware of it.These notes might also help, later on, in the invoicing activity because it is easier to allocate a certain amount of time to a working task (even though Time Clock is not the best tool to do so since it does not allow team members to split projects into phases and categories).

Time Clock 365 offers a variety of ways for managers to track employee attendance:  from GPS location to biometric access control, to alerts and reminders to biometric time clocks through recognition terminals.

Despite these smart and helpful ways to keep an eye on employee time, Time Clock is mainly focused on monitoring employee time in terms of attendance. This excludes other possible, and important insights for better project management, ways to track and manage time or receive data about how it has been spent.

Time Clock 365 also offers a specific section called Timesheet in which the employees can already find the days of the month ready to be filled in with the working hours spent in the office, in smart working, or on the field.

Microsoft Teams time tracking via timesheets (Excel or Google Sheets)

Excel Spreadsheets and  Google Sheets offer the opportunity to manually track time and many companies rely on them since they both are tools already available in their workspace and are usually considered, wrongly, easy the use.

Spreadsheets have always been used to keep track of employees’ time, sick leaves, and other working permissions, and, later on, online spreadsheets have taken an important role in the action of tracking time.

Companies usually utilize a general, big spreadsheet to manage the whole company and, at the same time, employees also use “smaller” and specific spreadsheets (for example the ones to better manage each department, project, or company’s activity such as payroll).

Excel is an evergreen tool available in almost all companies and this thing does not usually scare off employees who, otherwise, have to face another tool such as a time tracker that usually brings an unfair, reputation, of beings tricky to get used.

But despite this perk and the fact that, yes, it does deliver time reports, Excel was not designed to track time and, because of it, it brings complications and, also, mistakes, along.

Let’s now see the defects of tracking time with Excel sheets and the free add-on tool, Time Clock 365.

What both Time Clock and Excel timesheet lack

Microsoft Teams time tracking free approaches (functionalities of Time Clock and its timesheets) mainly lack 4 important features that usually managers need to make data-driven decisions for better project management:

·   Real-time tracking: Time Clock and Excel timesheets do not record in real-time time and this means that every day, at a certain hour, employees have to remember to manually write the time down. This action requires time and also effort since the employees have to remember to fill it in and send it to the managers, at the same time, the managers have to remember to check and approve the time entries. Since it is an annoying and boring action, employees usually postpone it at the end of the week/month and this means missing the point of the action itself;

·   Certainty and automation: Manual time entries, as just said, imply effort and wasting of time and these two factors lay the foundation for human mistakes, incomprehension, and annoying approval processes that could easily be avoided.
Using Excel spreadsheets, employees have to manually run the stopwatch and transfer the data manually.
We have to say that a time mistake made with a corporate Excel file might lead to another, perhaps bigger, mistake such as, for example, invoicing or payroll;

·   Features able to split projects into tasks and allocate them to the right team member: Microsoft Teams allows managers to allocate and check the progress of team members thanks to the feature, Microsoft Lists. Employees are also able to write down when they started a task and when they finished it but this is not possible to do when the task needs to be allocated singularly;

·   Possibility to make accurate time reports: Excel offers the possibility to extract time reports but they are not trustworthy since Excel provides insufficient ways to gather the data. Of course, this implies a misleading reporting subsystem that should not be taken into consideration if the managers rely on data-driven files.

Benefits of Time tracking Software

Structured time tracking software, such as Timeneye, offers features such as real-time, both online and offline, tracking, automatic tracking on other apps while being/leaving Teams (thanks to integration widgets), and insightful and customizable reports. 

The reality is that managers and employees rely on the Microsoft ecosystem since it provides great professional tools and, for this reason, they need a time tracking tool that perfectly integrates with:

• Microsoft Teams;
• Microsoft Planner;
• Outlook Calendar;
• Microsoft To Do;
• Azure DevOps.

Timeneye is a perfect solution if you are looking for time tracking software able to efficiently, and easily, integrate with Microsoft Teams.

When you connect Timeneye with the Microsoft Teams app using the native Microsoft Planner integration, all of your projects are automatically synced, so you don’t have to do it yourself!

Time tracking controls will naturally appear right inside the interface.

What does that mean? It means you will find Timeneye integration directly in your Microsoft Teams desktop app without manually doing it yourself!

We are not the only ones who consider Timeneye as a great time tracking software for Microsoft Teams; others say that too!

GetApp, a very influential technologies research website, visited by managers to collect info about the best software on the market, rated Timeneye 4.8 (over 5) stars as one of the best Microsoft Teams time tracking software.

Timeneye, time tracking software for Microsoft Teams 

Timeneye is a professional and easy-to-use time tracker that is used by freelancers, who need to keep track of their time to bill the clients properly, and big companies that need to split projects into different tasks, allocate them to the right person and make data-driven decisions thanks to insightful reports. 

In Timeneye it is possible to track all your daily working activities in real-time; including the ones you usually do on Microsoft Teams such as meetings, chats, workshops, etc., etc.

Timeneye also allows users to distinguish billable and non-billable activities, helping the managers invoice the client, and, thanks to the Microsoft Teams integration, it is also possible to include in the bill the amount of time you spent on calls and meetings! It was not a waste of time, with Timeneye it was billable time 😉

Timeneye is also thought to help you set customizable and easy-to-read reports so you can make your evaluation and see if you spent more time doing actual work on your project or, instead, you mostly spent it on meetings with your client on Microsoft Teams!

Let’s not also forget that Timeneye is a time tracker that collects the data and it safely stores it on the cloud it fully integrates (so you do not have to manually do it yourself) with a variety of software and services and it perfectly works on browser extensions (Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge).

Integrate Microsoft Teams with Timeneye

It is now time to start tracking time directly in your Microsoft Teams so let’s follow these easy and quick steps!

1. Log in to Microsoft Teams;
2. Go to the 3 horizontal points and, between the group of apps, select Timeneye;
3. Import your team members from your Microsft account;
4. Start tracking time by clicking on the blue, “+” button. Since you have synced Timeneye to your Microsoft account you can now see all of your projects and you can easily start allocating time to the one you are working on!

Timeneye allows you to track time in Microsoft Teams, thanks to our native app in the Microsoft Teams store.

What are you waiting for? Go and sign up to receive our 30-day free trial!