Running Your First Report

Reports are where you read the recorded time. AbleTime has three, all reached from Reports in the sidebar, and each one covers a different kind of question: in Summary you see where the hours went, in Activity you see who recorded them and how much, and in Progress you see how the task work is moving. This guide covers choosing the report that fits your question, setting the period and filters, reading the result, and saving the reports you run every week.

Which report fits which question

Summary shows hours for a period, grouped by person, project, or category, with the list of entries behind every number. Use it for questions like what a project cost last month or how the week split between clients. Most reporting happens here, so most of this guide covers it.

Activity shows who logged time, how much, and the shape of their days. Run it before you rely on any other report: hours that were never recorded make every downstream number read low.

Progress covers tasks rather than hours. It shows throughput, velocity, capacity, and cycle context for Time Flow work; use it to see whether delivery is speeding up or slowing down. It requires Time Flow enabled for the organization.

Setting the period and filters

You frame a report with a period and a set of filters.

The period comes in two kinds. A shortcut (Today through Last 90 Days) is a rolling window: it recalculates every time you run the report. Explicit dates fix one specific period: a billing run, a sprint, a quarter. Choose a shortcut for a question you ask repeatedly, because a saved report can store the shortcut and recalculate it on every load; choose fixed dates for a period that must never drift.

You narrow the record with filters. Team, Project, and Client narrow who and what; Billable separates client work from the rest; Backlog includes or excludes hours logged against backlog tasks. A filter appears only when the data can use it: Client when work is client-tagged, Epic when the period contains epic work.

The State filter appears only when timesheets or billing is enabled, and its options follow what your workflow can produce: Submitted and Approved come with timesheets, Invoiced with billing. Use it to see which hours are still provisional and which have already been billed.

With Tag and Description you search inside the entries themselves; text and tag search is a Pro plan feature.

Reading the result

The Summary page has two tabs. Summary shows the period as a chart, hours by day with billable and non-billable kept distinct, so a light week or a drop in billable hours is visible before you read any number. List shows every entry behind the totals; open it when a figure looks wrong and you need to see exactly which time produced it.

You also choose the grouping, a two-level cut that should match your question. Group by User for questions about people's weeks, by Project for questions about cost, by Category for questions about the kind of work; the second level (down to individual time entries under User or Category) sets how far the tree drills down. The pie chart alongside shows the same grouped hours as proportions; read it when the question is about shares rather than totals.

Saving the reports you run every week

A saved report keeps the filters, and optionally the period and the grouping. When you click Save Report, you choose which of those to keep. Include Date Range stores a date shortcut so the report recalculates it on every load: a saved last-week report always covers the most recent week. Include Aggregation Settings keeps the grouping, so the report reopens cut the way you left it. Available to All Users, where offered, shares the report with the whole team; share any report the team discusses, so everyone quotes numbers from the same filter set.

If you change the filters or the period of a loaded report, the view is renamed Custom Report until you save it again, so a loaded report always matches exactly what was stored. Load Report brings a saved report back, and Show Global Reports adds the shared ones to the list.

Exporting

You export from Export Report, and the export matches the view exactly as configured: the dates, the filters, the chart type, and whichever of Summary or List is showing. Get the report right on screen first, then export. Choose CSV, Excel, or JSON to download the filtered entries as data for another tool; choose PDF or Print for the formatted report a reader will see. Layouts and columns are covered on Printing and Export.

The Activity report

Use the Activity report to check that the record is complete. Three figures head it: Active Users, No Activity, and Total Hours. Act on No Activity: a name there means the person has no time entries in the period, and hours that never got logged understate every project they should have landed in, so follow up and complete the record. Click a person to open their User Report, which holds the per-person detail and its own export options (CSV, Excel, PDF, Print).

The Progress report

The Progress report opens on a 90-day window. Keep the period long: its metrics are trends, and a week of data is too little to show one. The unit in this report is the task, so the filters start with a task cut (All Tasks, Done, or In Progress) before the usual team and project narrowing.

The chart shows one metric at a time: Scope Burned, Throughput, Velocity, Lead Time, Accuracy, or Momentum. Click any point to open the tasks or hours behind it. Below the chart, Project Summary shows each project's scope against its actual hours, Cycle Context and Capacity Breakdown appear when the period's work carries cycles or capacity types, and the Progress Ledger lists every matching task with a Ref linking straight to it.

You export Progress the same way as Summary, with one addition: in Print / PDF you choose which charts and which data sections go into the printed report, so a stakeholder copy can include the velocity chart without the full ledger.

Practices that keep reports reliable

• Start from the question: Summary for where the hours went, Activity for whether they were recorded at all, Progress for how the task work is moving.

• Run Activity before the report that matters. Unrecorded hours make Summary totals read low with no visible sign that anything is missing.

• Save the reports you run every week with their rolling date shortcuts, and share the ones the team reads together, so everyone quotes numbers from the same filter set.

• Get the view right on screen before you export. The export contains exactly what the screen shows.

Every field on these pages is covered on Reports, Summary Reports, Activity Reports, Progress Reports, and Printing and Export.