Understanding employee Timesheets in Insightful is essential for properly tracking employee productivity and time management. Timesheets provide a breakdown of work, idle, and break time, enabling managers to monitor activities accurately.

With customizable views and export options, timesheets offer valuable insights for evaluating productivity trends and optimizing work processes. By leveraging this data effectively, organizations can improve efficiency and make informed decisions to achieve their business objectives.

At the top right corner of the Timesheets page (found under the Time and Attendance section), you’ll see a toggle that lets you switch between Day View and Shift View. This feature gives you flexibility in how you review employee time data—whether you want a broad overview of the day or a more detailed look at individual shifts. Below, we’ll break down how each view works and when it’s most helpful to use them.

The Day View provides a complete, summarized overview of all time-related activities that happen during a calendar day for an employee. It is especially useful when employees have multiple work sessions or shifts throughout the same day. Instead of showing each shift separately, the Day View groups them together and displays a consolidated line item for that day.

For example, if an employee clocks in in the morning, goes on a lunch break, then returns to work, and later in the evening logs in again to check emails, each of those sessions could count as three separate shifts in our system. In the Day View, all of these shifts are grouped together and automatically summarized so you don’t have to add up total work time manually. Insightful does this calculation for you.

The Shift View shows each individual work shift as a separate entry. Unlike the Day View, which summarizes all shifts into one line per day, the Shift View provides detailed insight into every work session.

A shift is any continuous period of work—so if an employee works in the morning, logs off, then returns, those are two separate shifts. In this view, you can see exact clock-in and clock-out times, productivity, breaks, and other activity for each shift.

Shift View is helpful when you need a closer look at performance for one shift or want to check compliance with schedules.

Your employee time sheets will look like this:

Columns that are visible to Employees on the Timesheets tab on Time&Attendance page:

Let's break down each column:

Work time is the total time recorded between employee clock-in and clock-out. See below for more specifics on how this works based on your Insightful installation type (e.g. Stealth Mode) and settings.
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Computer Activity is the total time spent actively working at a computer during their Work time. (Idle time is not included here).

Used to log and track any work-related activities that happen offline, or are not computer-based. Manual Time Entries, once processed, will be displayed here and in other Dashboard tables.

Based on your productivity label settings, Productive time will include the total time spent on productive activities during Work time.
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Based on your productivity label settings, Unproductive time will include the total time spent on unproductive activities during Work time.
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Based on your productivity label settings, Neutral time will include the total time spent on neutral activities during Work time. Activities that are not reviewed will be considered neutral as well.
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​Idle Time represents the total amount of time where a user was not actively working on the computer during their Work Time. Learn More here.
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Break Time represents the amount of time that was taken as a break by your employees during their Work time.
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When you request a report download, the system processes your request, and once the file is ready, you will receive a notification which you can check by clicking the bell icon in the upper-right corner. The report may take some time to generate, depending on the file size, but as soon as it's complete, you can click on the notification to download the file.

You can customize your column view or export the sheets for offline analysis.

Here is another way to look at some of the key column calculations:

​Work time = Computer Activity + Idle Time + Manual Time + Break Time

​Computer Activity time = Productive Time + Unproductive Time + Neutral Time

Managers need to have the "Manager can review Time and Attendance" permission enabled to access Time and Attendance → Timesheets and Employee Timesheets, which also grants them access to the notification bell icon for export notifications. If a manager has access to timesheets, they will also be able to download the export. Additionally, employees can export their own timesheets as well.

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In Stealth Mode with Unlimited Tracking Scenario, Computer Activity Time is determined by tracking the duration between the first and last computer activities recorded for the day.

For example, if a user's computer is inactive for a period during the day and goes into sleep mode the Clock Out time will represent the last time of recorded activity.

Insightful delivers most of its data in real-time. Minor discrepancies caused by sync delay can be experienced though, most commonly with network/internet difficulties on the user's side. This usually doesn't last long and the data is correctly recalculated immediately after the delay.