How to use Automations

Automations are the easiest way to get basic reporting of spent time directly from monday.com boards and dashboards. You don't get a breakdown by dates and people, but the total number of hours can often be enough to keep track of planned hours vs. tracked hours or to calculate the amount to be billed.

For example, you can set up two Number fields on an item:

• Hours planned where you specify number of hours planned for this particular item (that can represent a project, a task, etc.).

• Hours spent will be filled with the total number of hours actually tracked on this item in 7pace Timetracker.

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Then, whenever you track or modify hours in 7pace Timetracker, the Hours spent field will be populated with the value from 7pace Timetracker.

Now you have total hours in a monday.com column, you can use it in any way that monday.com provides, such as:

• Projecting total hours to a parent board by using the Connect boards feature and mirroring the Hours spent column.

• Or comparing planned vs. actual hours by utilizing Hours planned and Hours spent columns in dashboard widgets (like in the image, below).

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When using Automations, please make sure that your monday.com plan supports a high enough number of actions - the limits are described in monday.com documentation. Even with moderately large boards, you will easily end up with thousands of used actions.

How to set up

First, head to a monday.com board and add a new number column. Name it Hours Spent. Ideally, place it next to an existing Hours Planned column where you manually enter the planned hours.

Click Automate located at the top right of your screen.

Navigate to the Templates section, then go to Integrations, search for 7pace, and select it. Search for the following Automation and click use template. Choose the Hours Spent column you just created as the target for the tracked hours.

Click Create Automation.

Now, whenever time is tracked on an item in your board, the hours will automatically sync to the Hours Spent column.

What about subitems?

If you use subitems in your projects and track time on them, you will have to set up the automation twice - once for items, once for subitems. Make sure your subitems contain a numeric column which can be used for synchronization.

Once you have your Hours spent columns in both items and subitems and you synchronize time with these, you should end up with something like this:

But what if you want to see total tracked hours of an item and all its subitems on an item level? You can use some monday magic for that. You will need:

1. A mirror column on an item level summarizes hours spent on subitems. It can be created by clicking on a respective subitem column and selecting Show Summary on Parent Item from the context menu (three dots).

2. Then, create a formula column on the item level that will calculate the sum of hours spent on an item and on its subitems. In the image below, notice how Total hours spent calculates the sum of Hours spent (item level) and Subitems Hours spent (summary of subitems).

That's it, you're done!

Conditional Automation using custom fields 

You can enhance this automation by adding conditions based on your custom fields. For instance, you may want to sync only billable hours to a separate column. To achieve this, follow the steps outlined in the "How to Set Up" section, with the following modifications:

After selecting 7pace as described earlier, pick the automation template that includes conditional settings. Click Use Template.

In the automation setup, select the custom field that will serve as your condition. Choose the specific value that will trigger the automation. For example, you can choose the Billable custom field and set the value to Yes. Next, select the column where you want the hours to be synced. In this example, choose the Billable Hours column.

Click Create Automation. 

This process can also be applied to subitems and adapted to any custom field you've set up. For instance, you can use it to sync hours based on specific activity types or other criteria that are important to your workflow.

Final notes

Setting up automations may seem a bit complicated, but it can provide your boards and dashboards with the basic information about total tracked time quickly.

If you're tired of setting these up over and over again, we recommend creating a template board and creating new boards by using the template board as a template. In such cases, you don't have to set up automation from scratch, but make sure you check if they are working on both subitems and items - several times, we encountered a situation when copied automation did not work at first and had to be re-set. This is out of our control as the automations are handled by monday.com.