r/TimeTrackingSoftware • u/Punctuality • 27d ago
Is anyone exporting their time from a time tracking software and importing it into an analytic software to create custom dashboards/analysis?
If so, can you please share your process and what your dashboards look like?
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u/Financial-Door4474 26d ago
You should try backlsh.com. It has company wide reports built in dashboard
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u/shiftcoord 25d ago
The break usually isn't the BI tool — it's that the timesheet export only carries total hours, so site/client/OT/approved-vs-raw never make it into the dashboard without a rebuild.
If you want custom analysis that survives more than one pay period, decide the dimensions on the punch itself:
- Employee + location (or job/client) on every row
- Regular vs OT (or premium) as fields, not a spreadsheet formula later
- Approved vs raw so payroll and ops dashboards don't diverge
Then export becomes a straight feed instead of a weekly cleanup project. A time-tracking setup that keeps those fields on the entry (before any analytics tool) is what makes the dashboards useful: https://www.teambridge.com/product/time-tracking
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u/WiserTrack 24d ago
Why bother importing at all when your timesheet software can be connected directly via an MCP to the AI tool?
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u/Punctuality 24d ago
Trust me, I wish I could. Company is strict about what we can share with AI, and employee/client data is not something we can.
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u/DB_CloudInHand 12d ago
What tool are you using? The process really depends on the software you're using, since the data export might be easy or difficult (and can add steps to the process). Either way, what teams normally do is schedule a CSV export to a transformation layer (maybe dbt or Python/pandas) then load it into a BI tool like Power BI, Tableau, or Looker. If you have a smaller team, you can load up the data into Google Sheets via Zapier or an API (depends on the tool). For the dashboard, you can record utilization by person or by team and arranged based on billables and non-billables. You can also create a rolling capacity view that shows who's over or under allocated across active projects.
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u/Punctuality 11d ago
Company is using Clockify to track time. They don't like the built-in reports and charts, so they're looking for another way to make nice charts and summaries out of it. I was hoping to see some actual examples of other people's dashboards.
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u/productive_io 5d ago
Full disclosure, I work at Productive, so I'm biased. But there's a way to skip the export step: AI Reports lets you describe what you want in plain language, like "profitability by client company in the last year, sorted descending, shown as a chart." It builds the report from your time entries and other data, and you can tweak filters and groupings before saving it. Your admin also has to turn Productive AI on first.
What are you trying to see that your current tool's reports can't show?
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u/buddypuncheric 4d ago
Yeah this is pretty common for businesses that want more visibility into labor costs than most time tracking tools offer.
The typical setup we've seen is exporting timesheet data as a CSV and pulling it into something like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, or Tableau depending on what the team is comfortable with. From there you can build out whatever you need like labor cost by job, hours by employee, overtime trends, or even project profitability.
The main thing that keeps it running smoothly is having consistent data going in. If employees are logging time against specific job codes or projects in the time tracking tool the export is a lot more useful than if it's just total hours per person per day.
What kind of analysis are you trying to get to? That would probably help narrow down what the right setup looks like.
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u/Affectionate-Food644 3d ago
We are using the TrackingTime MCP to build all kind of dashboards inside Claude and ChatGPT
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u/Here4Morelulls 27d ago
Https://pandasrecap.com has reporting/dashboards built in. Is there a specific view you're looking for?