Some industries rely on time to bill their customers. Their invoices are dependent on tracked hours and materials that are delivered.
If these are incorrectly logged, customers might not be invoiced correctly, and projects are at risk of becoming unprofitable.
For an IT company, that can mean support hours never make it to the invoice.
For a manufacturing company, a piece of equipment that’s unaccounted for during maintenance can delay approval chains and billing.
Without a clear time tracking record, projects lose transparency, risk non-compliance, and invoicing by time and material becomes impossible.
The Odoo Timesheets app solves this by making time tracking part of the work itself by connecting it with key apps like Projects, Field Services or Accounting.
Project tasks, repair orders, and support tickets live in the same system as the timesheets, so hours are logged right where you work and integrated with your core business processes.
Table of contents
What type of businesses rely on timesheets?
Why do companies need timesheets in the first place?
Day in the life of a maintenance company using Odoo Timesheets
How the Timesheets app integrates with the wider Odoo suite
Track both time & material and fixed-price projects with Odoo
What type of businesses rely on timesheets?
Timesheets are built for teams that need accurate records of time spent on their work, for example: Consulting and IT companies, agencies, legal firms, and field services companies that offer maintenance & repairs on-site.
Based on these use cases, typically, a consultant needs to log the hours spent on meetings and project tasks for their manager, while keeping deadlines and workloads visible to the customer. They need to have their time recorded throughout the day to avoid scrambling to get days’ worth of work logged at the end of the week.
Support teams, and especially IT companies or customer service teams, need integrated timesheeting. The time they spend on each support task has to be clear for colleagues to pick up the task. Clients also need to have an overview of the process, and this information needs to be stored within the ticket itself for transparency.
Field-based staff need to record hours worked on site as they carry out tasks, as catching up and logging time at the end can lead to billing errors. Time tracking should be a routine part of their job, and as easy as switching a timer on and off.
To tackle these challenges, companies need a timesheeting process that fits into their daily workflows.
They need to track their work precisely as it happens, and link that time directly to tasks, tickets, or on-site jobs.
Why do companies need timesheets in the first place?
Companies that work with time & materials offers are often legally obliged to keep track of employees’ time. Many countries have regulations in place to protect both customers and companies when providing services.
For example, since July 2024, all EU employers have been legally required to use a reliable time-tracking system to record time and material offers.
This legislation comes from the EU Court of Justice ruling and enforces the standards of the Working Time Directive: a maximum 48-hour average workweek, at least 11 hours daily rest, and 24 hours weekly rest.
Employers must retain time records for several years (depending on national law), give employees access to their data, and ensure GDPR-compliant protection.
Companies that fail to comply face significant fines, which vary across member states.
Fines can reach up to 20,000€ in Austria, and CHF 40,000 in Switzerland. They can start at £5,000 in the UK under their own regulatory act, and 2,500€ in Ireland.
In the specific case of Germany, all employee hours must be tracked, not just overtime, and fines can reach up to 15,000€ if legislation is not complied with.
This extends to digital time tracking, as new legislation is currently being drafted to enforce these requirements.
Odoo’s Timesheets app meets these legal requirements.
It builds compliance into a company’s daily time tracking by:
- Creating start and stop timestamps every time an entry is captured
- Calculating and tracking daily time totals to abide by legal limits
- Automatically preparing reports for legal audits.
This means users don’t need a separate tool just for compliance. With Odoo, they get one unified workflow that supports both operational integrations and legal time tracking.
Day in the life of a maintenance company using Odoo Timesheets
Tracking hours should be part of the routine and project work as the day unfolds.
For example, a maintenance company working in the B2B sector has to carry out machine repairs for a customer. They need to track time spent on-site, get it through levels of internal and external approval, and send it to be billed.
The Odoo Timesheets app makes this possible for all involved teams.
See how it can log worked time and connect it from the maintenance operative who repairs the product to the finance team that bills the customer.
Morning
The day begins with an on-site visit to fix a machine in a food production line.
As soon as the operative arrives and starts work, they start a timer directly from the Field Service task on their mobile phone.
They carry out the scheduled repairs, take a picture and add notes to the task, while the time tracker runs in the background.
By the time the job is complete and the operative presses stop, the timesheets are recorded in the task and immediately linked to the customer order.
Afternoon
On the way to the next call, the operative does not need to stop and prepare reports.
The hours are already in the system and visible to the office without any extra steps. A work summary is automatically created based on the timesheet.
The operative just needs to press a button to send the report, and it will be reflected in a Sales Order.
End of the week
The manager reviews the team’s timesheets at the end of the week through the overview.
Any gaps stand out clearly, and the manager can call out the operative on missing timesheets very quickly.
For certain contracts, the client also receives a summary of time spent, providing an extra layer of confirmation before proceeding to billing.
End of the month
By the time accounting steps in, most of the work is already done.
Approved timesheets are ready in draft invoices, matched against the service orders.
This way, every logged hour has been accounted for and approved along the way.
How the Timesheets app integrates with the wider Odoo suite
Time entries don’t make sense in isolation. They become useful when connected to the work that teams do every day, to save time and effort.
The Odoo Timesheets app links hours directly to projects, service work, support requests, and billing, ensuring that recorded effort flows through the entire system.
Odoo Timesheets & Projects for agencies and digital service providers
In companies like consultancies, agencies, or law firms, customers are billed on an hourly or daily basis.
With the Odoo Timesheets and Projects apps, teams can log their hours directly on project tasks and track the time and effort they spent on allocated work.
Project managers get visibility into time spent versus budget, while customers see accurate billing based on the work that was delivered.
Managers can see their teams’ timesheets in a complete overview and can approve them directly.
Managers can validate their team’s timesheets from one main overview.
Managers can see and manage all timesheets from their teams and sort them by employee.
Odoo Timesheets & Field Services for maintenance companies
Combining the Odoo Timesheets and Field Services apps is ideal for companies that provide on-site services like hardware repairs, underground maintenance or device installations.
They can start their time tracking directly from the Field Services app, create work reports based on timesheets, and see exactly the time delivered and billed in the Sales Order.
Workers can activate the Timesheet start-stop timer directly in a Field Services task.
Field workers can send reports based on timesheet data, where customers can sign off on work done.
This is how a sales order based on timesheets looks in Odoo (Delivered time is fully based on the timesheets of this specific service). You can see all the details of this timesheet on the smart button on the top “Tasks”.
Odoo Timesheets & Helpdesk for IT customer service teams
Combining the Odoo Timesheets and Helpdesk apps is an ideal strategy for IT service providers or customer support teams that need to track effort per ticket.
Agents can start timers or log their time directly from the Helpdesk app, linking hours to customer requests.
This makes service contracts transparent, keeps invoicing accurate, and gives managers a clear view of workload distribution.
Customer support managers can invoice an intervention directly in the Helpdesk app - from ticket to billing.
Track both time & material and fixed-price projects with Odoo
Companies that track employees’ time often work in two different models: time & material offers and fixed-price agreements.
Time & material offers are often chosen for their flexibility. Companies charge for the services that they provide and invoice based on time worked or materials spent.
For example, during on-site maintenance work, a broken product might need an extra piece that was not accounted for and still needs to be charged.
In a consulting project where work is tracked by the hour, a task might take more time than expected. This still needs to be approved by the customer and invoiced internally.
In other instances, companies may choose to sign fixed-price contracts instead. In such cases, projects are quoted at a set and upfront price.
In these cases, timesheets are used internally to track time spent for project insights, to make sure that projects are profitable, and to stay on top of legal and compliance requirements.
The Odoo Timesheets app makes sure all these situations are accounted for, as it lets users issue invoices by time and material or add extra logged hours on top of fixed-price projects.
Configure Odoo to invoice for time & materials
To start, you must have the Sales, Project, and Accounting apps installed in your Odoo.
In the General Information tab, set the Product Type to Service.
Then, open the drop-down menu in the Invoicing Policy field, and select Based on Timesheets.
Next, from the Create on Order drop-down menu, select Project & Task.
Now, when a sales order is created with this specific service product, a new project and task are also created in the Project app.
You can also select the role of the employee carrying out the work in Plan Services.
You can invoice your customers based on fixed-price options and time & materials through timesheets. You can also charge based on project milestones or manually input the delivered quantity (see image below).
Odoo Timesheets turns logged hours into project insights
The Timesheets app keeps track of your employees’ time and ensures that it’s audit-ready.
It also gives you a wide overview of how this data impacts your business with its integrated reporting functionalities - including overviews by Project, Department, Employees and more.
A Project dashboard overview shows employee hours in a weekly review and profitability based on timesheets.
Managers can access task reports that show where time is being used - from employee overtime, to hours spent and remaining on a project.
Odoo Timesheets overview in the Dashboard app.
These are only some of the reports available in Odoo.
You can also make other reports, based on different KPIs as well as use different visualisations (e.g., Charts, Lists, Pivot tables) to track your key metrics.
You can also save your favourite reports to access them whenever you need.
In the end, Odoo turns logged hours into insights to support both daily operations and long-term decisions.
Get started with Odoo Timesheets
Talk to our Odoo experts and set up timesheet workflows that are tailored to your organisation.