Odoo Timesheets Implementation
Project time tracking and approvals.
Log time against projects and tasks with mobile entry, manager approvals, client invoicing, and profitability reports.
Odoo Timesheets records hours against a project and a task, then lets those hours become a cost, an invoice line and a utilisation number without anyone retyping them. Every entry is an analytic line, so the same record that says a developer spent four hours on a task also carries the cost of those four hours to the project's analytic account. That single storage decision explains most of what the app does well and most of what surprises people later.
The base app ships in Community. Entry against a project and a task, the analytic posting, and billing hours through a service product on a sale order are all there. Enterprise adds three things: the weekly grid view, the start and stop timer, and validation that locks a period. A Community project can still bill from hours. It cannot stop somebody editing last quarter, and that is usually the sentence that decides the licence.
The value is not in the entry screen. It is in whether the hours are trusted enough to invoice a client, defend a research tax claim or price next year's work. That depends on cost rates, project structure and approval discipline set in the first two weeks, not on the app. Getting those wrong is recoverable, but only by reworking history that people have already been paid against.
Who Odoo Timesheets is for
- → Professional services firms, agencies and consultancies that sell time and need delivered hours to reach an invoice without a spreadsheet in between.
- → Internal project teams that need cost per project rather than cost per department, taken from the same record the work was logged on.
- → Engineering, software and product teams claiming research relief, where a per project time record has to survive an audit years after the work.
- → Support and field operations already on Odoo Helpdesk or Field Service, where the hours are a by-product of work that is happening anyway.
- → Groups that recharge time between legal entities, where a management fee has to be supported by a record of who did the work, on what, and at what cost.
- → Not for hourly workforces that need clock in and clock out evidence, which is Attendances, and not for shift rostering, which is Planning.
Key features
- ✓ Mobile & desktop entry
- ✓ Manager approval workflows
- ✓ Client invoicing from timesheets
- ✓ Billable vs non-billable
- ✓ Project profitability
- ✓ Utilization KPIs
What Odoo Timesheets actually does
Hours stored as analytic lines
A timesheet entry is an analytic line carrying the employee, the date, the project, an optional task, a description and a duration in hours. It posts to the project's analytic account, which is why timesheet cost appears in project profitability and in analytic reporting with no separate posting step. It also means the line holds a length, not a span. Odoo records how long the work took, not the clock times it sat between. The Enterprise timer keeps a start stamp while it runs, but what it writes when it stops is still a duration.
Cost from the employee, revenue from the order
Each employee carries an hourly cost in their HR record, in the company currency, and Odoo multiplies the recorded duration by that rate to produce the cost side. Revenue arrives from the other direction, through a service product on a sale order whose invoicing policy bills based on timesheets. The two meet on the project. Neither figure is typed by the person logging time, which is what keeps the numbers usable at month end.
Billing hours without retyping them
Set a service product to invoice based on timesheets and give it a service tracking option that creates the project or the task on order confirmation. Logged hours then raise the delivered quantity on the order line and the next invoice picks up whatever has not been billed. The other policies behave differently and the choice is hard to reverse once orders exist: prepaid sells a block of hours and the order line shows what remains, milestones ignore hours entirely and invoice on completion.
Approval and locking a period
Enterprise adds validation. A manager validates timesheets up to a date, and lines before it stop being editable for anyone outside the approver group, so an invoiced month cannot quietly change afterwards. Community has no equivalent. Teams on Community either accept that history stays editable or restrict write access on past lines with record rules, which is workable and easier to get subtly wrong than most buyers expect.
Allocated hours and what is left
A task carries allocated hours. Timesheets accumulate against them and the task reports hours spent and hours remaining, going negative once the work overruns. The same comparison exists on the sale order between hours sold and hours delivered. Neither is a stop. Odoo reports the overrun rather than preventing it, so overrun control is a report somebody reads on a Monday, not a control the system applies.
Reporting that answers utilisation
Timesheet lines pivot by employee, project, task, date and billable status, so utilisation, recovery rate and effective hourly yield are pivot views rather than development work. Billable follows the sale order line the timesheet is linked to, not a tick box on the entry, which is worth knowing before anyone promises a billable percentage. Whether approved time off is recorded as timesheets changes the denominator in every one of those figures.
How we configure Odoo Timesheets
Decide the project and task shape before anyone logs an hour
The analytic account sits on the project, so the project is the smallest unit you can report cost against unless you go down to task level. Firms that create one project per client find they cannot answer profitability per engagement. One project per engagement with a task per deliverable answers both questions. Reorganising afterwards means moving thousands of analytic lines, which is possible and unpleasant, so spend the workshop time here.
Load hourly costs before the first entry, not after
The cost on a line is calculated from the employee rate in force when the line is written. An employee with no hourly cost produces lines worth nothing, and a month of apparently free work in the profitability panel is the usual way this gets discovered. There is no effective date on the rate either, so a rate that changed in April cannot simply be applied from April without deciding what happens to the lines already written.
Set the encoding unit and hold it
Timesheets are encoded in hours or in days, and days are derived from hours using the company working hours per day figure in the Timesheets settings. The stored duration does not change when you switch, but everything on screen and in every export does, and altering the hours per day figure later restates how all historical lines read in days. Pick hours and hold it. Where a local practice or a research claim wants days, derive days in the report rather than moving the encoding unit under a year of history.
Set the working schedule, because it is the denominator
The employee's working schedule decides what a full day and a full week are worth. It drives the hours to days conversion, the capacity behind every utilisation figure, and whether a four day week reads as under-recording. Part time staff, a Sunday to Thursday week in the Gulf, a 35 hour week in France and a shortened Ramadan day are all schedule records rather than settings. Copying one calendar across a whole group is how a consultant who is genuinely 80 percent utilised gets reported at 64.
Import history as analytic lines, in decimal hours
Migrating a year of timesheets means loading analytic lines with employee, date, project, task, description and duration. Durations are decimal, so seven and a half hours is 7.5 and never 7:30. Cost is derived from the employee's current rate as each line is written, so imported history is valued at today's money rather than the money it was earned at. Settle that with finance before the load, not after. Import one month, reconcile totals per employee against the source, then run the rest.
Set access groups so people see their own hours
The Timesheets access levels run from a user who sees only their own lines, through a user who sees everybody's, to an administrator. Leaving the whole company at the top level is the default mistake, and in a consultancy it means every consultant can derive a colleague's pay rate from the cost amount on their lines. Decide this with HR in the room, because hourly cost is salary data wearing a different label.
Where Odoo Timesheets projects go wrong
Timesheets used as proof of attendance
A timesheet says four hours went to a task. It does not say the person was at work between nine and one, because the line stores a duration and nothing else. Labour inspections, working time law and client disputes all ask the second question. Where that matters, run Attendances alongside, reconcile the two, and expect a genuine gap between recorded attendance and recorded project time rather than treating the difference as an error to chase.
Invoicing before approving
The billing run reads delivered hours whether or not anybody checked them. On Community nothing prevents an edit after the invoice is raised, and on Enterprise the validation step is the first thing dropped under month end pressure. The sequence has to be fixed and owned by a named person: log, review, validate, invoice. A month of clean invoices buys more client trust than a fast one ever does.
Uncosted or wrongly costed people
Contractors logging time under a shared employee record, staff whose rate was never entered, and multi company groups where the rate sits in one currency while the project reports in another all produce margins that look precise and are wrong. Check the cost side before showing a profitability figure to anybody. A project that appears to run at ninety percent margin usually means somebody in the database is working for free.
Reading project profitability as profit
The profitability panel sets timesheet cost and other analytic costs against invoiced and to be invoiced revenue on that project. It carries no overhead, none of the salaried time nobody logged, and none of your revenue recognition policy. What it produces is a contribution figure per engagement, which is the right number for deciding whether the work was worth running and the wrong number to reconcile against the profit and loss. Firms that publish it as margin spend the next quarter explaining the difference to their own board.
Expecting the app to enforce a budget
Allocated hours, hours sold and remaining hours are all reported and none of them are blocked. Odoo accepts the two hundredth hour on a hundred hour fixed price task without complaint. If an overrun has to be stopped rather than observed, that is an automation written for the purpose, with a stated rule for who can override it. Assuming the system already does it accounts for a lot of unhappy first quarters.
Retrofitting timesheets onto a team that never kept them
The technical work takes a fortnight. The behaviour change does not. Daily entry survives, weekly catch up entry degrades into invention within about two months, and invented hours are worse than no hours because they get invoiced. Attach entry to something the team already has to do, keep the task list short enough to pick from on a phone, and report completeness by person from the first week.
What it works with
- + Project, which owns the tasks, the allocated hours and the analytic account every line posts to
- + Sales, where a service product with a timesheet based invoicing policy turns delivered hours into invoice lines
- + Invoicing, for the credit notes and revenue figures that follow any timesheet corrected after billing
- + Employees, which holds the hourly cost, the working schedule and the manager who approves
- + Time Off, so approved leave can appear as timesheet entries and a short week stops reading as under-recording
- + Attendances, for the check in and check out record that timesheets deliberately do not keep
- + Purchase, where a subcontractor bill posted to the same analytic account puts bought hours and internal hours into one project cost
- + Helpdesk and Field Service, both Enterprise, where hours logged on a ticket or an intervention become the same analytic lines
Odoo Timesheets by country
Saudi Arabia (KSA)
Capacity moves with the calendar here. The working day shortens through Ramadan for Muslim employees, on Hijri dates that shift about eleven days a year, so a utilisation baseline hard coded to eight hours misreports a full month annually and the working schedule has to carry that change rather than the report. On the billing side, an invoice built from hours is a standard tax invoice and clears through ZATCA before it reaches the client, so a month end run of forty client invoices is forty round trips rather than a print job. Arabic is required on the face of that invoice, which matters more than it sounds when the line description is generated from a service product instead of typed by a person.
United Arab Emirates
Corporate tax at nine percent turned intercompany time recharges into a transfer pricing question. Where staff employed by one entity work on another entity's projects, the management fee behind that needs support, and a per project hour record with a costed rate is the most direct support available. The trap is that the employee hourly cost in Odoo is a cost, not an arm's length price, so the mark up policy belongs on the sale side as a product and a price list rather than being folded into the rate and lost. Keep the recharge invoice traceable to the hours it came from, because the question arrives years after the work.
Pakistan
Withholding under section 153 is deducted when the client pays rather than when you invoice, so the cash that lands is smaller than the recovery figure the timesheets produced, and the two have to be reconciled per client instead of assumed equal. Sales tax on services is a provincial matter, so the same consultant's hour can carry a different rate and a different registration depending on the authority the engagement falls under, which makes that jurisdiction a property of the project record rather than a note on the invoice. Neither fact is visible anywhere in the timesheet app, which is why both surface at the first quarter end.
India
Hours billed to an overseas client are a zero rated export of services, raised without IGST under a letter of undertaking, with payment required in convertible foreign exchange inside the prescribed period. That makes the customer's status on the sale order the timesheets feed a compliance field rather than a reporting convenience. Where delivery runs through an SEZ unit the hours also have to be attributable to the unit that performed the work, which argues for one project per contracting entity rather than one per account manager. Getting the entity wrong looks like a data fix and behaves like a restated return.
United Kingdom
Research and development relief is the reason most UK software and engineering firms finally put timesheets in properly. A claim needs the Additional Information Form filed ahead of the return, splitting qualifying expenditure by project, with staff cost apportioned by the share of each person's time spent on qualifying work. HMRC has been pressing hard on claims where that apportionment is a percentage somebody assigned afterwards, and a contemporaneous per project hour record is the difference between a claim that survives enquiry and one that gets withdrawn. Externally provided workers and subcontracted work are restricted differently from employed staff, so the record has to distinguish who was on the payroll and who was not.
Germany
The research allowance under the Forschungszulagengesetz is claimed on qualifying research wages, and the claim rests on documented hours per employee per project, with the project certified separately from the tax filing. That is a timesheet, and it has to have existed while the work was happening. GoBD then expects records feeding the accounts to be traceable and not quietly alterable, which is where a Community setup that lets any user rewrite last quarter becomes a compliance argument rather than a preference. Bear in mind too that a per employee record carrying a cost figure is employee performance data, so how it is reported is a works council matter and not only an access rights one.
France
The research tax credit, the CIR, is the strongest single reason a French firm runs timesheets properly. A claim needs time per researcher per project, retained and produced years later during an inspection, and an apportionment reconstructed for the claim is exactly what gets rejected. Separately, managerial and autonomous staff on a forfait jours contract are engaged in days per year rather than hours, and the employer has to track that day count and the rest periods around it. Keep entry in hours and report days out of it. Switching an entire database to day encoding for the benefit of one population is the wrong trade.
United States
Federal contract work is where timekeeping discipline stops being a preference. Defense Contract Audit Agency expectations are specific: the person who did the work enters their own hours, enters them daily, every correction keeps the original value alongside a stated reason, and no supervisor logs time on someone else's behalf. Standard Odoo records that a line changed without capturing why, so any project touching federal funding should price that audit trail before the billing design rather than after the first incurred cost submission. Commercial clients rarely ask for any of it, which is why it gets missed on the one contract that does.
Odoo Timesheets FAQs
What do we actually lose by staying on Community?
The weekly grid, the timer, and validation. The first two are convenience. The third is the one that matters, because without it nothing stops an invoiced month being edited afterwards. The usual Community answer is a record rule blocking writes to lines older than a set date with a small group allowed to override, which works and is easy to get subtly wrong, so test it against a real correction rather than a demo. The OCA timesheet repository also carries sheet and approval modules, though confirm your version is covered before planning around them. Moving to Enterprise later is a licence change rather than a migration, because the data model is the same and the modules install over the history you already hold.
What happens to hours logged after an invoice has gone out?
They sit on the order line as delivered but not yet invoiced, and the next invoice sweeps them up. The awkward case is the other direction. If somebody edits or deletes an hour that was already billed, the delivered quantity drops below the invoiced quantity and nothing reverses the invoice for you, so a person has to notice and raise a credit note. That asymmetry is the practical argument for approving before the billing run.
Can cost rates vary by role, by seniority or over time?
Not in standard Odoo. There is one hourly cost per employee, applied as each line is written, with no rate history by date and no override per project or per role. Differences in what you charge belong on the sale side, where they are a product and a price list. Differences in what people cost you, across a promotion or a year end, are either accepted as a known distortion or built.
Can freelancers and subcontractors log their own time?
Only as internal users with an employee record behind them. Portal users cannot create timesheet entries. On Enterprise that is a paid seat per contractor, which on a large bench can exceed the seat count for permanent staff; on Community the seats are free but the access rules still need thought. The alternative is a delivery lead entering contractor hours from the supplier invoice, which works and loses the daily detail.
How do we treat internal and non-billable time?
Give it somewhere to go. An internal project with tasks for admin, pre sales, recruitment and training keeps that time inside the same analytic reporting instead of disappearing. Hours with no sale order line behind them report as non-billable, which is what utilisation needs as its denominator. Firms that only create client projects end up with a system claiming everybody is fully billable and a management team that knows better.
Does any of this feed payroll?
No, and it should not. Payroll runs off the contract, the working schedule, approved time off and, where you use them, attendance records. Project timesheets are cost accounting: they say what work absorbed a salary you were paying anyway. Firms that try to pay people from project hours end up with a payroll that breaks whenever somebody forgets to log a Tuesday. Keep the two apart and reconcile them monthly as a completeness check, which is a useful report in its own right.
How much timesheet history should we migrate?
Enough to answer the questions you will actually ask. For most firms that is the current financial year plus the one before it for comparison, and any engagement still open in full regardless of age. Older data is usually better kept as a read only extract outside Odoo than loaded and half trusted. The real cost of loading more is not the import, it is that every historical line is revalued at today's rates, so a long history makes old work look wrong to the person who ran it.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, in a mobile browser, and the entry screens hold up on a small display. The difference worth planning around is the timer, which is Enterprise. Hours captured while the work happens and hours reconstructed on a Friday afternoon are not the same data. The gap shows up first on short tasks and internal work, where reconstruction rounds everything to the nearest half hour and inflates the day to exactly eight.
Can clients see the hours logged against their project?
Project visibility settings decide whether a portal user sees the project at all, so exposing hour detail to a client is a decision to take explicitly rather than a default to discover. The point to watch is that the cost amount sits on the same analytic line as the duration. A careless access rule shows a client what your staff cost you, not only what you billed them.