Why Track Your Week

Time is the one resource every business consumes identically. Whether you bill clients by the hour, run a team on award rates, or just want to know where the week went, a timesheet answers questions that gut feel cannot: how many hours actually went to that project, how much overtime is accruing, and whether you have capacity to take on more work.

This article builds a weekly time tracker in Excel from scratch: a simple layout, formulas that total themselves, and a structure that rolls up into payroll, billing and capacity planning.

The Layout

Keep the sheet shaped the way people think: days down the rows, work types across the columns.

Enter hours as decimal numbers (8.5 for eight and a half hours). The totals row and column calculate themselves with plain SUM, and the bottom-right cell is the week's total.

For project-based work, flip the structure: days down the rows, projects across the columns, and a "General" column for anything not billable. The same SUM formulas give you per-project totals, which is what feeds client billing.

The Formulas That Do the Work

Total hours from start and end times

If you prefer entering start and end times rather than hours, convert with:

=(end_time - start_time) * 24

Excel stores times as fractions of a day, so multiplying by 24 converts to decimal hours. 9:00 to 17:30 returns 8.5. Wrap it in IF to handle breaks:

=IF(end-start > 6/24, end-start-0.5, end-start)

This subtracts a 30 minute lunch break whenever the shift is longer than six hours, and leaves short shifts untouched.

Overnight shifts

A shift that crosses midnight (22:00 to 06:00) makes end-start negative. Fix it with:

=IF(end >= start, end-start, 1+end-start)

Totals by type across the month

When weeks live on separate sheets, roll them up with SUMIF:

=SUMIF(Week1!$A$2:$A$6, "Overtime", Week1!$B$2:$H$6)

Or use SUMIFS when the summary needs multiple conditions, such as overtime for a specific project.

Making It Useful Beyond the Sheet

Payroll-ready output

A summary sheet that totals regular, overtime, and leave by type per week gives payroll everything it needs in one place. Keep the type names identical across weeks (data validation lists again) so SUMIF matches cleanly.

To turn those totals into net pay, our wages calculator applies tax, Medicare and super.

Billing hours to clients

For service businesses, the project breakdown is the billing record. Add a rate column per project and multiply hours by rate to produce draft invoices:

=SUMIFS(Hours!C:C, Hours!A:A, "Project Alpha") * rate

Capacity planning

This is where a timesheet becomes a planning tool rather than an admin chore. Once you know how many hours your team actually delivers per week, you can see how much work you can take on. Our guide to services capacity planning in Excel builds exactly that analysis on top of timesheet data, and rostering in Excel shows the scheduling side.

Team and remote work

For distributed teams, the same weekly structure works per person, with a row per team member and a shared summary sheet. See managing remote teams with Excel for the tracking patterns that hold up when nobody shares an office.

Keeping It Honest

A timesheet is only as good as the habit behind it. Three practices keep the data useful:

1. Fill it in daily, not weekly. A week of memory produces rounded, optimistic numbers. Five minutes a day produces data you can actually rely on.
2. Keep types consistent. Regular, Overtime, Annual Leave, Sick Leave, Public Holiday. No free-text variants, or the totals break.
3. Review the outliers. A week where someone logs 60 hours is either a capacity problem or a data problem. Either way it is worth a conversation before it becomes a payroll surprise.

Related reading

• Services Capacity Planning in Excel
• Using Excel to Build an Efficient Employee Rostering System
• Managing Remote Teams with Excel: Tracking and Productivity