Odoo Timesheets: tips and tricks that save your team time

1. Start with the right filters

When you open Timesheets, you see your own hours by default. A few filters that save a lot of time:

• My Timesheets versus All Timesheets: in the Timesheets menu. You only see "All" with the right to see other people's hours.
• Date: Odoo 18 and 19 have shortcuts for Today, This Week and Last Week; in Odoo 20 you pick the period with the date filter.
• Search on a field: type a name in the search bar and choose whether to search by employee, project or task (in 18 and 19 also by department or manager).
• Favorites: save a combination of filters you use every week as a favorite. Tick Default filter and it is ready whenever you open the screen.

2. Group, even on two levels

In the list you can group by project, task and employee (in 18 and 19 also by department and manager, among others). Pick two groupings in a row, for example project and then employee, and you see per project who logged how many hours, with a subtotal per group. That answers "how many hours are already in this project?" without a report.

3. Pick the view that fits the question

Odoo Community has these views for timesheets:

View	What for
List	Entering and checking. The list is directly editable: a new line appears at the top.
Calendar (from Odoo 19)	Seeing which days have hours, and where the gaps are.
Kanban	A card per line, handy on a small screen.
Pivot	Hours per project against employees or months, with totals.
Graph	How the hours evolve per week or per month.

The grid view (a row per task, a column per day) and the timer are in the Enterprise module timesheet_grid, not in Community. In TimeViking you have both, also with Community: a week grid where Tab jumps to the next day, and a timer that creates a timesheet line the moment you stop it.

4. Use the keyboard

Odoo has shortcuts for the buttons on every screen. Hold Alt (on a Mac Control) and they appear:

• Alt + C: new line;
• Alt + S: save;
• Alt + J: discard changes;
• Control + K (on a Mac Command + K): the command palette, to jump to a menu or record.

TimeViking goes one step further: quick entry turns a sentence like "yesterday 9-12 #support tickets" into a line with project, task, time and description.

5. Set up your projects and tasks properly

A lot of trouble with timesheets starts with the projects:

• Timesheets on for the project. In a project's settings, tick Timesheets; otherwise nobody can log time on it.
• Allocated time on the task. Give every task a budget in hours. The task shows the percentage already used, in red when the budget is gone.
• Hours on the task itself. In the Timesheets tab of a task you add lines directly, without leaving the screen.
• Days or hours. In the Timesheets settings you choose whether your team enters hours or (half) days.

6. Invoicing and approval

If you bill time and materials, install Sales next to Timesheets. With a service product invoiced "based on timesheets", the hours land on the sales order automatically, and from there on the invoice. How to set it up and where it goes wrong: invoice timesheets in Odoo.

Approving (validating) timesheets is part of Odoo Enterprise. With Community, let your team submit the week in TimeViking and approve it there: see approve timesheets in Odoo.

7. Reports you actually use

Under Reporting › Timesheets there are three reports: by employee, by project and by task. They open as a pivot table or a graph. A few tricks:

• Click a header to go one level deeper, for example per project and then per employee.
• The arrows swap rows and columns.
• The download button sends the pivot table to Excel, exactly as you see it on screen.

If you use time off, you can also enable the module for time off in timesheets: approved leave then appears as a timesheet line. And with the attendance module you compare logged hours with attended hours.

8. Timesheets on your phone

Odoo has a mobile view and apps, but for people on the road a long list with small fields stays awkward. That is why TimeViking has its own mobile app: pick a recent project, tap in the time or start the timer, even without a network. The hours go to Odoo as soon as you are back online.

Odoo stays the source

Everything above works in Odoo itself, and it should stay that way: Odoo is where your projects, sales and invoices come together. TimeViking does not replace it, it gives your team a faster way to get the hours in. More on the Odoo integration page and the pricing.