10 Reasons Not to Use Excel for Project Time Tracking
by Alexander Huber
Introduction
Over many years of implementing time cockpit project time tracking solutions, we see the same path again and again: a company starts with Excel. At first glance, that seems logical — it’s there, familiar, and free. But the longer it’s used, the more weaknesses appear, driving up effort and error rates.
Below are the ten most important points we repeatedly observe in projects and why we say today: Excel is a fine start, but rarely the long‑term solution.
1. Excel is too generic
Excel is a general‑purpose tool and that’s the problem. Project time tracking needs structure: customers, projects, tasks, billing types, approvals. All of that has to be recreated manually in Excel, often via complex formulas or pivot tables. It costs time and requires Excel expertise in the team. A misplaced semicolon or a deleted formula can distort entire evaluations.
2. The multi‑user problem
Excel wasn’t designed for multiple people working in parallel. Even with cloud storage like OneDrive or SharePoint, practical issues appear:
- Version conflicts when two people save changes at the same time.
- Lost changes because a file was edited offline for a while.
- Performance issues when large files are opened by multiple users at once.
Especially at month‑end, when everyone is back‑filling time, chaos ensues.
3. Error‑prone by design
In Excel, practically anyone can change anything without automatic validation. A typo in a time field, a missing date, or duplicate entries happen quickly. More dangerous: errors often go unnoticed because there’s no automatic check for overlaps or unrealistic values. We’ve seen sheets where employees accidentally recorded 26 hours for a single day and it was only noticed weeks later.
4. No audit trail
Where working time is billable or legally sensitive, traceability is mandatory. Excel provides only rudimentary change tracking often disabled or hard to evaluate. If an entry is changed or deleted, it’s nearly impossible to later see who did it, when, and why. For audits or disputes, that’s a nightmare.
5. Catch‑up time is painful
Many employees don’t log time daily but collect receipts or memories and enter them in bulk. In Excel, that means tedious searching in old lists, no overview of recorded vs. missing days, and no system that reminds or warns. The result: gaps or incomplete months that have to be corrected under time pressure at month‑end.
6. No fine‑grained permissions
Either you lock the file completely, or everyone has full access. Fine‑grained permissions common in specialized systems don’t exist in Excel. That creates data protection risks: reasons for absence, sick days, or confidential project time become visible to all. In sensitive industries, that’s simply unacceptable.
7. Missing validations
Project time tracking often involves complex rules: maximum daily working time, no bookings on public holidays, no entries after project end, automatic break deductions. In Excel, such rules have to be built manually. Even when macros implement logic, they’re hard to maintain and often break when the sheet structure changes.
8. No integrations
Excel stands alone. If you want to reconcile data with payroll, ERP, Jira, or a ticket system, you need manual exports and imports. Each integration is a mini‑project or you end up copying and pasting, with all the risks of transfer errors and missed updates.
9. Backup and restore are hit‑or‑miss
Excel files often live locally or loosely in cloud folders. There may be automatic versioning, but many don’t know how it works or how to use it. If a file is accidentally deleted, overwritten, or corrupted, the damage is significant. In the worst case, entire months are lost.
10. Not scalable
With five people, you can still somehow keep Excel under control. At twenty, fifty, or a hundred employees, it becomes a nightmare:
- Files become huge and slow.
- Manually merging multiple files is error‑prone.
- Consistency rules have to be checked repeatedly by hand.
Scaling problems often force companies to switch mid‑year adding complexity to billing and reporting.
Excel’s advantages
We want to be fair: Excel has strengths.
- Quick start: no IT project needed, no training required.
- Availability: almost every company already has it.
- Flexibility: custom templates and analyses can be built quickly.
For individuals or very small teams, Excel can be sufficient at least to get started.
Conclusion
From our experience, Excel for project time tracking is like using a pocket knife for surgery: it can work, but it’s not the right tool for professional use. If you want to work efficiently, securely, and scalably in the long run, plan an early switch to a specialized project time tracking system. That avoids rising administrative effort and ensures time tracking is efficient, secure, and reliable.