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Understanding the value of Reporting with the Timesheets and Budgets add-on

In This Article

The Timesheets and Budgets Add-on (TBAO) gives organizations a first-class solution for tracking time and reporting on estimated and actual time and costs both at the project and portfolio levels.

Specifically when reporting using the TBAO, users have the option to aggregate, group on, and filter by time entries and estimates and their attributes, as opposed to tasks or projects like in Asana’s regular reporting.

TBAO reporting provides a plethora of benefits for time and cost tracking, monitoring project health, and comparing estimates, actuals, and (coming soon) budgets.

This document covers all the reporting benefits that come with the TBAO.

Note iconNote

Coming soon, based on those time entries and the budgets and rates set by admins at the project level, TBAO will also enable reporting on budgets. In the future, the TBAO will also include reporting on capacity and AI Teammates credits usage as well.

Better reporting on estimates

Many organizations start planning work across projects at a high level. They use capacity planning to give different projects high-level estimates. As the definition of those projects progresses, detailed task-level estimations are made, estimating using Asana’s workload view and/or directly on tasks.

TBAO reporting elevates these estimation workflows in many ways:

Reporting on estimates from capacity plans

The TBAO allows users to create dashboards that report on estimates coming from either capacity plans or tasks, compare them side by side, or add them up. This is not possible without the add-on—one can only report on tasks as a source of estimates.

Support of placeholders for reporting of estimates

In capacity plans, users can give estimates to placeholders before knowing who will work on a project. For example, one may assign 30 hours of work to a “Software Engineer” placeholder and later transfer those estimates to an actual Engineer based on staffing decisions.

Without the TBAO, users can’t report on estimates given to a placeholder, which would mean incomplete data when reporting on estimates that include time assigned to placeholders.

Reporting on date ranges for estimates

Without the TBAO, reporting on estimates is based on any single dates of the tasks: their due date, completion date, or creation date. In other words, it’s not possible to report on estimated work for a time range.

Contrary to regular charts, the TBAO will use the date range defined in the estimates (via tasks or capacity plans) and spread it across that date range. For example, an estimate of 5 hours on a project with a date range that spans across 5 workdays will automatically get distributed as one hour per workday.

Better reporting on actuals

Once the execution of the work starts, organizations rely on the TBAO’s timesheets to track actual time spent on tasks or general project work. They can also enter those actuals directly from a task.  

Billable vs. non billable hours

The TBAO allows users to track and report on whether estimates and actuals are billable or not. This is very useful for actual time because it means that a single task or project can have a combination of billable and non-billable entries. This would be impossible to do with Asana’s regular reporting since each task or project can only have one value for a similar field.

Timesheet entry approval status

With the TBAO, timesheets can be submitted for approval from a manager. Time entries can be in several states like submitted, reviewed, approved, or rejected. TBAO reporting will allow to group or filter time entries by these statuses to make it easy to see which time entries are in what state. 

Tracking time for general work on a project

Within TBAO’s timesheets, users can log time spent on general work in a project—as opposed to time spent on specific tasks. The new TBAO reporting aggregates both actual time spent on specific projects and the general project time. Adding or reporting on general time spent on a project is not possible without the TBAO.

Other improvements

Reporting on primary or billable projects

Without the TBAO, users reporting on estimates and actuals from tasks that live in more than one project will double count those estimates and actuals, once per additional project. The TBAO provides a single “attributable” or “source” project for each time entry or estimates, making sure time and cost is accounted for just once instead of duplicating them.

Coming soon: Reporting on budgets

The TBAO allows project admins to set a budget to track the total time and money allocated. TBAO chart will allow the visualization of project budgets.

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Understanding the value of Reporting with the Timesheets and Budgets add-on