What to actually look for in a timesheet report

The most common mistake when reading a timesheet report is treating total hours as the only number that matters. Total hours tells you how busy someone was, not whether that time went where it should have.

Filtering by project before filtering by employee usually surfaces the more useful question: is this project taking more hours than it's worth, regardless of who logged them.

Short date ranges — a single week — are good for catching problems early, like a timer left running overnight. Longer ranges, a full month or quarter, are better for spotting trends, like a project that's quietly grown from two hours a week to twenty.

And when a number looks surprising, export the CSV and look at the individual entries before assuming the total is wrong. More often than not, the entries explain exactly why the total looks the way it does.