Turn Outlook Meetings Into a Timesheet
2:42 · English · Published
Turn Outlook meetings into draft time entries, assign projects using keywords, confirmed history, or a default project, then review and confirm entries before they count toward hours, budgets, and exports. Auto-import requires Business; calendar keywords require Pro.
Recorded with the product available at publication. See current plans and pricing for the latest details.
Full transcript
This video has one goal. By the end of it, the meetings in your Outlook calendar arrive on your timesheet as entries with the right project on them, and you spend about a minute a day approving them instead of typing them. The first step is one switch, Auto-import events as drafts. From now on, every sync turns new meetings into draft entries. The only question left is which project each draft lands on, and Teetrack answers it in three ways, in this order. It uses a keyword you set on the project, then your own confirmed history, then a default project you choose here.
Keywords come first, and they are the simplest. On the Contoso project I'll add the keyword contoso. From now on, any meeting with that word in its title lands on that project automatically. The match ignores case and looks anywhere in the title. If two projects both match, the longer keyword wins, so contoso migration beats plain contoso when you need it to.
History needs no setup at all. This is my Northwind sync. I've confirmed it onto the Northwind retainer four times over the last few weeks, so Teetrack has noticed, and that's what this suggestion is. It looks back ninety days through your own confirmed entries and matches on the meeting title. Click Use this, and the project is set.
Then the review is a pass down the list. I'll set the project and mark this billable. This meeting ran long, so I'll stretch the end time and confirm it. The internal standup isn't billable and I don't want it, so I dismiss it, and a dismissed event stays dismissed on every future sync. I already agree with the rest, so I'll confirm them all at once. A normal day takes about a minute.
Here is the case I'd worry about if I were you. I tracked this two-hour block by hand while I was working, and there is a calendar event for exactly the same slot. Teetrack didn't import it. When a confirmed entry already covers most of an event, the event is skipped, so tracking as you go and importing afterwards don't fight each other.
That's the goal met. Confirmed entries are ordinary entries. They show up in the summary, they count against the project budget, and they go out in the same PDF or C S V as everything else. Your calendar was already your timesheet. Now it's one you can bill from.
Auto-import is on the Business plan at four euros a month, and keywords are on Pro. The written guide covers all of it and is linked below. The last video in this series is about what Teetrack can and can't see in your calendar. Teetrack has a free plan at teetrack dot it.