Timesheets

Timesheets help your organization record, approve, and export hours at the daily and individual level without manual tracking during work. The feature automatically generates daily timesheets for ever

Swarmia Timesheets is currently in closed beta. If you are interested in enabling the feature for your organization, please contact your account manager or [email protected].

Overview

Who is it for?

Timesheets are designed for organizations that need to track and approve hours at a daily level for reporting purposes. The primary use case is compliance with R&D tax credit systems and government R&D subsidies, including:

• WBSO (Netherlands)

• SR&ED (Canada)

• CIR (France)

• R&DTI (Australia)

• Forschungszulage (Germany)

• State R&D tax credits (US)

Key features

• Automated time allocation: Swarmia analyzes development activities from your integrated tools (like Jira and GitHub) and converts them into daily hours for each person. The system includes special tracking for activities like debugging or research that don't generate Git activity.

• Timesheet view: This view shows a daily breakdown of hours worked by each team member, grouped by epics that are tagged for timesheets. Each row includes the issue key and related initiative for easy reference.

• Review and edit: Team admins can manually adjust the auto-populated hours. Any manually changed cells are highlighted to track adjustments.

• Approval workflow: Team admins approve their team's timesheets. If a timesheet isn't approved within five days, a reminder is sent to the parent team's admin.

• Day-off management: The feature can sync with your HRIS system to account for time off, which can also be marked manually.

Using timesheets

Getting started

1. Enable the feature: Swarmia Timesheets is currently a feature-gated release. Please contact your Swarmia representative to have it enabled for your organization.

2. Define rules and tag projects: The feature identifies work that you want to track in timesheets using issue filter rules, typically based on a custom field in your Jira Epics. For example, a “WBSO Project” custom field can mark epics in your R&D tax credit program. Swarmia then applies a filter to identify all work linked to tagged epics, automatically categorizing hours for review and approval.

3. Assign team admin roles: Assign team admin roles to the managers or leads who will be responsible for reviewing and approving timesheets for their teams. Team admins will be notified when a new timesheet requires approval.

Reviewing and exporting

1. View timesheets: Once set up, anyone in your organization can visit app.swarmia.com/timesheets to view timesheets. The interface lets you examine all approved hours organization-wide for up to a year, then drill down to specific teams for detailed 2-week periods broken down by individual members. Team view shows both pending and approved hours.

2. Review & approve: At the beginning of every two-week period (10 working days), the designated team admin for each team will receive a Slack notification to review their team’s timesheet for the previous period.

3. Export for reporting: After approval, admins can export the timesheet data as a CSV file, ready for reporting to external reporting (such as tax authorities) or for other internal needs.

Glossary

What is WBSO?

The WBSO (Wet Bevordering Speur—en Ontwikkelingswerk) is a Dutch tax credit that reduces wage tax and social security costs for employees involved in approved Research and development (R&D) projects. To comply, companies must maintain and manage detailed daily timesheets for all employees working on these projects.

Timesheets automate this process by generating daily time allocations based on developer activity. Managers are prompted to review and approve these allocations every 10 working days. The workflow in Swarmia is designed to comply with WBSO requirements, and the exports are ready for reporting to the RVO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency).