Enter office time as hours per task, not clock times

Timesheets has a new Check in/out view for people who split their day across many orders: designers, detailers, programmers, project managers, foremen. Open your row and the week lists the tasks with time on them. Type the hours you spent on each one per day and you are done. No timer, no start and end times. Building Swell places the time inside your shift and keeps your check-in in step with it.

Type the hours the way you say them: "3h", "3.5h", "3h 23min", "90m", "1:30", "1:30:00" or plain "2" all land as the same time, in a cell or in an imported file. A file can also write a whole session in one cell, "09:00 - 10:00", the way most time trackers export it. Every export now carries the worker's identifier beside their name, and Import uses it to tell apart two people who share a name.

A whole-day total works too. Type it on your own row and it is shared across the tasks you already logged that day, in proportion. Typing less than what is already logged asks first, then lowers the hours. Hours already logged on the stages of an archived order can still be corrected.

Every session takes a comment. Open a day, hit Add comment under the task, and say what the time went on, or write it in the session's own drawer, which now has a Comment box of its own. Either way it shows up in the Sessions table and both exports, so a lead reading the week gets the reason without asking.

Click a task's name and the Update progress drawer opens on that stage, the same one Build and Planning use, so ticking off steps happens where you log the time, not in another module. Click a phase or component heading, or an order's heading when its stages sit straight under it, and it opens on all of its stages at once. It stays out of the way for anyone whose role cannot mark progress.

Stages sit under their phase or component, the way Planning shows them. The heading carries its ID, the order, its status and the project, and every stage shows its own status, so nobody starts logging on a stage that is still waiting. Fold the heading away and the whole group takes one number per day, split across its stages in proportion to the hours already on them. Useful when a phase has five stages and you only know the afternoon went to that phase.

Each department sets its own Check-in Gap Threshold in Department settings: how much of a checked-in day can go unlogged before the gap flag appears. Everyone starts at 30 minutes, which is what the flag always used. The same threshold holds back the no session hours flag, so someone who has just checked in is not flagged before their first task starts.

Departments are no longer tabs. The view shows the whole organization, and Department sits in Filters next to Team, Members, Orders, Stage and Issues, so a person who works in two departments in one week is one row, not two. Leads get a flag on each day that needs a look: no session hours, a gap between the check-in and the logged time, more hours than the shift, or sessions without a check-in. A day off, extra hours or a department closure shows on the day with the reason on hover, and a full day off is never counted as missed. Why a person is off shows only to people allowed to see their time off. Companies that split paid time into pay types see the same Pay Types tab and Missing Type mark here as on the classic view, and the export carries a column per pay type.

One person can work in two departments on one day. Type the day's total and the department with the earlier shift opens the day, the other one's hours follow, and each gets its own check-in. The check-in cell shows the sum and lists each department's span on hover; a task names its department only when the week touches more than one. What a day cannot hold is two time zones: hours typed on a task in another zone are refused with a note saying where the day already sits, and an empty day in a week that spans two zones asks which department's day it is when the schedule does not settle it. With a Department filter on, a day with more hours in another department says so under its total, so nobody tops up a four-hour day that was really eight.

Task list holds the stages your lead assigned you in Planning that are still to do or started, newest first, and filters them by project, due date and status. Its search box also finds a phase, component, order or project by the ID Planning shows. Bring one into the week, or add any other stage by searching for it, and it stays on the week whether or not it has hours yet: set up the week's shortlist on Monday and fill in the time as the days go by. Adding a task also assigns the person to it in Planning when your role can assign people there. Removing a task from the week leaves that assignment alone, so the task stays in the Task list for later. To find a stage, type its name with a word from its order or phase, like "panel 12 weld", and it comes straight up. An order, component or phase opens to show what it holds, and typing inside an order searches every stage in it. With nothing typed, the search offers your recent picks, your open assignments and the department's overheads. The day drawer's Add work session uses the same search. Filter by department and the list shows that department's work, so a designer picks from design stages instead of scrolling past the welding. Export writes the week to a spreadsheet, and Import reads the same layout back, including hours exported from other tools. Importing a file you exported keeps each session's comment and cost code, and changes only the sessions and comments you edited in it. Anything a file skips or ignores, like a session still running, is listed before the import closes. A row that would run longer than 16 hours is refused with a note to add AM or PM, since 8:00 to 4:00 otherwise reads as 8 AM to 4 AM the next day. One import takes up to 2,000 rows with hours, so split a bigger file by week or department.

Your Check in/out filters and the 1 or 2 week setting follow you now instead of staying in one browser, and you can keep a set of them as a view. Name it, and it sits in the menu at the top of the page ready to switch back to. Share it with a few people, a team, a role or the whole company, and they open Timesheets already narrowed to the department and the week length you set up, without being told which boxes to tick.

The Sessions export changes for everyone, whether or not this view is on: it gains Worker Identifier after Name, Stage ID after Stage, and Comment at the end. A spreadsheet that reads the export by column position needs to allow for the new columns.

This view is switched on per organization as teams move over to it. Until then your Timesheets look as they do today.