Insightful understands that work doesn't always happen in front of a device. To ensure a complete view of your productivity, Insightful offers a Manual Time Entry feature. This allows you to log and track any work-related activities that happen offline, such as on-site meetings, phone calls, or brainstorming sessions.

By adding these manual entries, you can fill in any gaps within your workday schedule and minimize the amount of "idle time" caused by non-computer tasks. This contributes to a more accurate reflection of your overall workload and contributions.

Admins can manually submit time, and so can Employees and Managers if Admins grant them permissions to do so (they will have the Add Manual Time button available).

Manual time entry can be performed from various Insightful Dashboard sections like Time and Attendance or Employee Timesheets.

For Manual Time Entries submitted by Employees, the status will be pending until they are either approved or rejected by a relevant Manager or Admin. They can edit and delete their entries as long as they are pending review.

After approval (or rejection), Manual Time Entries cannot be changed, ensuring accuracy and data integrity. However, after the review is done, users will be able to preview a Manual Time Report with all the Manual Time Entry information (including rejection reason, if applicable).

Manual Time Entries added by Admins or Managers are automatically approved. Employees can preview Manual Time entries added by their Managers through Time and Attendance → Manual Time.

Each Manual time entry will inherit Productivity and Billable flags from the associated Manual time entry type.

For example, if you mark Phone calls as always productive and non-billable, all phone calls will contain the same flags, but you will be able to override them per each entry when reviewing them.

By default, there are five Manual time entry types:

Manual Time Entries, once processed, will be displayed in multiple tables within your Dashboard such as the Employee page, Timesheets, Projects, Productivity, etc. On the Timeline's graphical representation of tracked time, manually entered time will be displayed in yellow for easier distinction.

Additionally, when choosing the productivity calculation that suits you best, keep in mind that Productive Manual Time and Neutral Manual Time are both included into the productivity calculation when calculating Productivity against:

When Manual Time is added that don’t overlap with an existing Shift - it will generate a new one.

Adding a Manual Time Entry that overlaps with an existing Shift will prolong that Shift. It will also cause the tracked data within the overlap to be overridden and replaced by Manual Time. Keep in mind that the screenshots taken during the Shift will remain in the Dashboard for future reference.

If a Manual Time Entry overlaps with two shifts, that Entry will be attached to the last shift, and that shift will inherit the start of the Manual time Entry as its Clock In time.

For example:

Add manual time:

Result: