Things become more confusing when you bring new team members aboard. The process is slow and plodding, sucking away time you could have used to be productive trying to fill out timesheets one painful cell at a time. This makes it difficult to keep an Excel timesheet up-to-date, and these woes are compounded by the fact that, if your team is using the same sheet to log all their data, only one person can work on it at a time. You can't do any automatic approvals, you have few analytical features, and your data is never going to be in real-time. You'll have to enter all your information manually-increasing the likelihood of errors, and requiring you to remind employees to fill out their sheets every day. As many other businesses that have made the change will tell you, though, Excel isn't exactly all it's cracked up to be when you're trying to devise an efficient system for keeping time.įirst, consider this: Excel is extremely limited in what it can do. You might even employ them in your own day-to-day dealings. Traditionally, Excel spreadsheets have been the go-to option that many businesses prefer for time tracking, either because they think it's a cheap and easy solution, or simply because its what they're accustomed to using. If there's one thing that holds true for almost all businesses, it's the fact that they need a way to track how much time their employees are spending on work.