Are you struggling to keep tabs on how your team spends their time? With ClickUp’s built-in time tracking tools, you can effortlessly monitor task progress, compare estimates to actuals, and even streamline payroll - all from one platform. Whether you're running a dev team, managing a marketing project, or coordinating QA, this guide will show you how to use ClickUp’s time tracking to boost efficiency and keep your projects on track.
1. Set Up Time Tracking in ClickUp
To start tracking time effectively, you’ll need to ensure that the time estimate and time tracked fields are correctly configured.
- Add Default Fields: Navigate to a task list, click the “+ Add field” button, and select “Add existing fields.” Look for “Time Estimate” and “Time Tracked” in the default options. These fields are mapped across all ClickUp spaces, so avoid using custom fields for time tracking - they won't integrate properly with ClickUp’s analytics.
- Input Your Data: Add an estimated time (e.g., 8 hours for a task) and track actual time manually or by using the play button as a timer. This creates a clear record of estimated vs. actual hours.
2. Group and Visualize Time with Dashboards
ClickUp’s dashboard feature is a game-changer for monitoring team performance.
- Set Up a Time Tracking Card: Add a time tracking card to your dashboard. This lets you group tracked hours by user, task, or even tags like “QA” or “feature dev.” For example, you could easily compare how much time was spent testing versus coding in a project.
- Filter and Customize Views: Use filters to focus on specific time periods (e.g., the last 30 days or a specific project). You can also adjust groupings to get insights by folder, list, or team member.
3. Use Time Tracking for Payroll and Reporting
ClickUp’s time tracking isn’t just about monitoring tasks - it’s a practical tool for running your business.
- Streamline Payroll: Generate reports to see how many hours each team member has worked over a specific period (e.g., two weeks). Export this data and use it to process payroll quickly and accurately.
- Track Efficiency: Compare estimated vs. actual hours to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your workflows. Over time, this data can help you create more accurate estimates for future projects.
4. Practical Use Cases for Time Tracking
ClickUp’s time tracking is incredibly flexible. Here are some ways to leverage it for different scenarios:
- Project Management: Measure time spent on individual tasks or entire projects to ensure deadlines and budgets are met.
- QA and Testing: Filter by tags to see how much time is dedicated to quality assurance versus development.
- Freelancer Payments: Use tracked time to create invoices or verify hours worked for contractors.
Conclusion
Time tracking doesn’t have to be complicated. ClickUp’s built-in tools make it easy to manage time, improve efficiency, and even simplify payroll - all while keeping your team on track.
If you have any questions or want to see another tutorial, let me know in the comments!
Video transcript:
0:00 Hello, welcome to our video series. We're going to talk about time tracking in ClickUp today, so by the end of this you're going to see, we're going to talk about all these different aspects of the time tracking feature in ClickUp.
0:12 It's really powerful, I really recommend it. If you're using ClickUp and you're a relatively small business, or you want to see how much time is being spent by a project, or maybe you're a dev team and you want to see how long different features or tasks you're testing, whatever it is, is taking, uhm
0:28 , this is a kind of, hopefully, a helpful overview of how time tracking works in ClickUp. Again, who am I? I'm Jed.
0:35 I'm founder of hydrant.us. Uh, you can get our free ClickUp mastery guide for busy CEOs. Go to hydrant.us. We do a lot of ClickUp setup for people who want to focus on what they're best at, and we kind of help them with ClickUp.
0:48 But this is going to be useful. You can do this yourself. Uh, the goal here is to show you really how I think about time tracking in ClickUp and, and how it can be useful.
0:57 So first what I did is I went to, uh, a . A specific list here, um, where I had a, whoops, if I had a list here of different tasks related to a marketing workflow.
1:13 So what I did is, um, I had this email campaign with new templates launched. It's just like a typical marketing task.
1:21 And, uh, you know, maybe you have some key KPIs here or channel, whatever it is. And I went ahead and added the time estimate and time tracked columns.
1:29 And if you want to add those, you want to go to add the field plus here, add existing fields, and you're going to see it as hidden in most cases.
1:39 And you just go ahead and add in time estimate and time tracked. Do not use custom fields for these. Um, these time fields are specifically mapped, their default fields for click up and they're mapped to time tracking.
1:53 So that's pretty important because if you want to see time tracking across all of different spaces and click up, you want to make sure you're using their The default fields.
2:02 So what I did is I added in eight hours for the estimate and then I tracked seven and a half hours of actual.
2:09 And if you want it's important, you can actually hit play on these. Um, so if you want people to use it kind of like a time clock or time stamp, um, you can do it that way.
2:20 Or if you, uh, are okay with people more generally adding time, just put in manual, you can do that too.
2:27 Um, and so it has my time entry here. Here. And I can delete that. Um, so we're good. So the question is, how would I be able to use this time tracked in a way that's useful?
2:41 Well, one of the ways, uh, I'll show you kind of the folder feature. The folder kind of acts, um, as kind of like a, a really deep, a great default dashboard, I would say, on what's going on inside the folder.
2:57 Um, this is a new feature, of course, to click up as well. You can add bookmark. It's really handy. This is like your dashboard for, uh, if you use SharePoint for Microsoft, this is like a powerful version of that.
3:08 But it's tied to tasks. So what I did is I had added a card and you can always add a new card, and there's one for time.
3:15 There's a bunch for time tracking. I had added a time tracking card and um, how you set it up is important.
3:24 So I like to group it by user, but you could also group it by list. Um, if you had a page .
3:31 . project based on a specific list, and then you could also see it by user or by task. So let's do that.
3:38 So our marketing team workflow has eight hours attached to it, estimated, and seven and a half hours tracked. You could also change the time.
3:48 Uh, you could say last 30 days, you could say, uh, you know, this year, if you're doing it project based, you might do it like, hey, let's see the whole project.
3:58 Um, and you can kind of see the time tracked versus Just ask them. So that's really useful. I think there's so many different ways you can use time tracking.
4:06 Um, I'm going to flip it again to where you're going to see it by folder and then by user. So in the marketing folder, maybe it's the marketing team we're seeing estimated versus tracked here for this week.
4:18 You could also organize it by tags. That's really important. So maybe you have a QA tag that you use and some of your tasks are marked have the QA tag attached to it.
4:28 You could also filter by that. Um, so you could. Kind of get an idea of like, hey, what is feature development cost in terms of time compared to QA.
4:37 So there's all different kinds of flexibilities here. Um, but I really like the time reporting feature. And in fact, um, we use it for a hydrant, of course.
4:47 And it's how we basically pay everyone on our team. Um, so I run a report of how much, uh, how many hours each person ran up on the last two weeks.
4:57 And then, um, I pay them out that way. So. . . Uh, in a payroll tool. So hopefully you can see just real quick, you know, estimated versus actual, we talked about that, how to filter by person, um, the dashboard slash folder feature, um, how you would track by project.
5:15 And then, um, I showed you kind of the actual functionality of like, how could you edit time or move entries, et cetera, that kind of thing.
5:21 I love click up time tracking. We use it. It's, uh, one of the best features in the whole program, I would say.
5:27 Um, and if you have any questions about it, feel free to hit me up or. . You have a video request, please let me know.
5:33 And I'll try and record something for you. Hopefully this is helpful. Again, I'm Jed with Hydrant, and I'll talk to you later.
5:38 Thanks. Bye.
