Timesheets: Stuck choosing the system and how to best approach this

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Posted on by JibblyGibbly

Hello all,

I have a decent experience with SharePoint and Power Automate but no much in terms of PowerApps.

I am trying to replicate our paper based timesheets to something digial where staff can enter the timesheets and select the manager for approval. Once aproved, it creates a cover sheet with the total hours worked, leaves taken per team at the end of each fortnight.

I tried getting rid of timesheets or only report the exceptions but the management didn't agree. I tried looking at a couple of off the shelf solutions but once again, the management didn't like them.

We are now a bit tight on the funding but I am getting mounting pressure from the staff for a new and improved timesheet system.

I am looking at SharePoint as a Database and PowerApps as the front end as we do not have the budget to spend additional per user licence for using PowerApps. Everyone in the agency, including myself, have a Business Premium licence and being a NFP in Australia has it's restrictions.

Here's some screenshots of what our current timesheets look like.

Regular Timesheet:

Ovetime:

Partime/Casual Timesheet:

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to best approach this or digitse it for ease of use? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Building Power Apps

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BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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I've done lots of timesheet solutions using Power Apps with a SharePoint List backend and it can work well. You'll find PowerFx (the expression language of Power Apps) is different than Power Automate, but you'll see the similarities quickly.

You'll come back to the forums to look for answers frequently, because many of the questions you'll encounter have been answered before. Some topics to get you started:

Your app will have some sort of form control for collecting the timesheet information from each user

You'll likely use a gallery (or several) to display timesheet info summaries

SharePoint's main shortcoming when doing these sorts of solutions has to do with making your queries delegable to the service backend. Power Automate can work with 5000 rows at a time, but a Power App by default works with 500 (can be increased to 2000)

Hope that helps,

Bryan
JibblyGibbly 44 on at

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That's great to hear. So to start off, should I create the columns in SharePoint list and create an app from there? I am assuming it's a canvas app.
Is there any pricing attached to this to make this app accessible by our 200+ staff to add and manage records?
BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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Using SharePoint lists and otherwise keeping your app using standard connectors will not require additional licencing beyond what your users have with an M365 business licence.

To plan out your app, take a bit of time to analyze what information your users will need to put into the app and how they might do that. As well, consider what users and managers will need to see or gain from using the app. These things will help point you towards the List(s) and fields you'll need for a well-functioning and maintainable app. We like to jump in and build first, but thinking about how to structure the data is a better first step.

Bryan
JibblyGibbly 44 on at

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That's very insightful. Thank you so much.
Since there is time function, I assume I need to be using date and time for most columns?
BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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That one is a "it depends" kind of answer. If your business need is to record timestamps because users will need to know clock-in / clock-out times now and in the future, then yes store full timestamps in date/time columns. If you only need to know the date of work and the quantity of hours, I often do that with a date-only column and a number column for the hours. There's often more than one way to accomplish the same thing.

If you store timestamps and have staff working across multiple time zones, do pay attention to how those are stored and displayed back to users. There is a TimeZoneOffset() function to help with that.

Bryan