Bauer Automate - Blog #Time Entry Extension

The Time Tracker IT Never Has to Install

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:00:00 -0600

A time-tracking rollout usually lands on your desk as a project. There is a vendor security questionnaire to fill in, an Entra app registration asking for consent to scopes somebody has to actually read, a provisioning connector to stand up, and at the end of it, a new pipe carrying your organisation's working data to a cloud you do not run. All of that for a tool whose job is writing down hours.

It is worth asking why the ceremony exists at all. It exists because the tool lives outside your tenant, so identity has to be bridged in and data has to be piped out. Remove that one architectural decision and most of the project disappears with it.

What zero setup actually means

ProjectPoint's time-entry surface is a browser extension for Edge and Chrome, and its requirements from IT are, precisely: nothing. No Entra app registration. No admin consent. No API permissions to review. It never reads cookies; it rides the user's existing signed-in SharePoint session, the one governed by the conditional-access and MFA policies you already enforce. This is not a marketing rounding of "almost nothing": the claim was verified on a vanilla tenant, with a normal user account holding only list-level permissions, with no admin action taken anywhere.

It can only see what they can already see

The extension writes time entries as rows in a SharePoint list, using the user's own permissions. It has no service account, no elevated identity, and no reach beyond *.sharepoint.com. If a person cannot edit the list, the extension cannot either. There is no new permission surface to audit, because no new permissions exist. Under Manifest V3 it runs no remotely hosted code, and its browser permission set is short enough to read in one breath: storage, alarms, the side panel, and SharePoint itself.

The record stays in the tenant

Because entries are ordinary SharePoint list items in your own site, everything you already do to SharePoint data applies to them automatically. Your retention policies, your backup posture, your eDiscovery scope, your audit trail: all of it covers the timesheet record with no extra configuration, because the record never left. There is no vendor copy to reason about, and nothing to repatriate if the relationship ends. Deleted entries go to the site recycle bin, where a site owner can restore them.

Governed from a list, not a console

Central control, where you want it, comes from a plain SharePoint Settings list on the site rather than a vendor console living in your tenant. A row can be a rule, enforced for every user and shown locked in their preferences, or a starting point that seeds new installs and then leaves people alone. The same list carries your brand colours, so both surfaces render in company colours before first paint. You govern the tool with list permissions you already understand, and there is nothing else installed to govern.

One component of a suite that thinks this way

The extension ships as the time-entry surface of ProjectPoint, and its setup story is the suite's philosophy in miniature: a user pastes the ProjectPoint site address, clicks Connect, and the extension finds the lists ProjectPoint installs by itself. The full ProjectPoint solution is a complete project management suite on SharePoint, the governed project workspace, the registry, the project registers, and time and budget capture, built on as much vanilla Microsoft 365 as possible, precisely so that questions like "where does the data live" and "what did we just consent to" keep having boring answers.

Two honest notes for this audience. Distribution today is a team install, with the store listing in preparation, so deployment is a sideload your desktop team runs rather than a store click. And the extension speaks to *.sharepoint.com only: vanity SharePoint domains and GCC tenants are out of scope for v1, and we will say so rather than let you discover it.

Get in touch, and we will show you the whole setup. It fits in one sentence.

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The Timesheet That Isn't a Separate System

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0600

Your billable hours live in a time-tracking tool. The project they belong to lives somewhere else: a site, a plan, a folder of documents. And once a month somebody sits down and reconciles the two by hand, matching a row in one system to a project in another, so the invoice can go out. The record your firm's revenue stands on is kept in the one place that has no direct connection to the work it describes.

That gap is not an accident of your setup. It is the shape of the whole category. Time tracking grew up as its own kind of software, a product you buy on its own, so the hours and the project they were logged against were never meant to live in the same system. The reconciliation is not a step you do badly. It is a tax you pay for keeping two records of the same afternoon in two different places.

Two records of one afternoon

Think about what a timesheet entry and a project record actually are. Both describe the same hour of the same person's work. One says how long and against what code; the other says what the work was part of, where its documents are, who is on it. Keeping them apart means every number has to be carried across the gap by a person, and the carrying is where the errors, the delay, and the month-end scramble come from. The hours matter most and sit furthest from the project.

One list, in the project's own site

ProjectPoint closes the gap by putting time where the project already is. An entry is a row in a SharePoint list in the project's own site, naming the project it belongs to, sitting next to that project's documents and its registers. It is part of the project record, not a separate system pointing at it from outside.

The way that time gets captured is a shipped browser extension for Edge and Chrome, and it is good at the job. It rides in the browser side panel, so it is present on whatever tab the work is happening in. Start a timer with one click, run several at once when the work genuinely overlaps and watch the wall clock split evenly between them so the total never inflates, or log time by hand when the timer missed it. A week strip shows the days you have and have not logged, and a month view answers the question people actually ask, which is not "what is my total" but "am I on pace", with the projection shown rather than hidden. It captures time well, and every minute of it lands in your own list using the sign-in the person already has.

It holds up against the tools built only for this

The mature time-tracking products, Harvest, Ruddr, Clockify and the rest, are good software, and we will not pretend otherwise. But every one of them is vendor-hosted, so the honest capture they give you comes with the record living on someone else's servers, under someone else's subscription. ProjectPoint gives you the capture, concurrent timers that add up correctly, a completeness view, a pace projection, and keeps the record in your own tenant, because it was never anywhere else.

ProjectPoint's time entry names a project, with a category, and reports against it. Time broken down to individual tasks and sub-tasks, against a full work-breakdown structure, is the relational model at the Platform tier on Dataverse; when that is the job in front of you, it is
the Platform conversation to have.

One component of a platform, not a point tool

The reason the timesheet is not a separate system is that ProjectPoint is not a time tracker that grew a project feature. It is a project management platform on SharePoint, and time entry is one component of its middle tier, alongside the four project registers and the capture of time and budget feedback from both the project lead and the people doing the work. The point of putting time in the project is that it stops being a silo and starts being one more thing the project workspace knows, reported on next to the budget it burns and the risks it carries.

Where it goes when you bill at a rate

For a firm that bills client work, the next step up is the relational model at the top tier, on Dataverse: rates, billable versus non-billable classification, an invoicing-ready export, and row-level boundaries so a contributor sees only their own entries. That is the Platform conversation, and it is the one to have when time to rate to invoice is the job in front of you. The middle tier gets your hours captured against the right project, in your own tenant, and reported on in context; the top tier turns them into what finance sends the client.

Get in touch, and we will show you hours that already know which project they are on.

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The Report Your Tenant Is Already Holding

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0600

Two rituals repeat in every delivery organisation. Once a week, someone sends the "timesheets please" email. Once a month, someone rebuilds the same status report by hand, copying numbers out of a tool into a slide, so leadership can see where the projects stand. Both are work that produces nothing new. Both exist to compensate for the same missing thing: a clear view of your own data that you can simply read.

The reason you cannot simply read it is usually where the data lives. When the record sits on a vendor's servers, getting a report out of it means exporting on the vendor's terms, in the vendor's shape, and then rebuilding the view you actually wanted. The report is a reconstruction, not a read. And the weekly reminder exists for a related reason: completeness is invisible, so a person has to stand in for the check a system should perform.

The reminder is a symptom of a report you cannot see

Look at the weekly chase for what it is. A manager broadcasts "timesheets please" because they cannot see whose week is complete, and a contributor cannot tell either, so two people spend attention on a question a glance should answer. The monthly report is the same problem one level up: the numbers exist, but not in a form anyone can point a chart at, so they get carried across by hand every period. Neither is a discipline failure. Both are what you get when the data is somewhere you cannot query freely.

The data is already list items in your own tenant

Here is the structural difference with ProjectPoint. Your Projects registry is a SharePoint list. Your time entries are SharePoint list items, in your own project sites. That is not a metaphor for "we can export it to you". It is the same data an executive roll-up reads, sitting in a place you already own the tools for, and ProjectPoint turns it into the views your week actually runs on.

The reports, and the reminders that carry their own answer

Every person entering time gets their own week strip, showing the days logged and unlogged, and a month view with a signed pace figure, ahead in green or behind in red, with the projection shown rather than hidden. That is reporting at the level of the individual, and it answers "am I on pace" without anyone sending an email.

Above it, ProjectPoint reports across the portfolio. A cross-project roll-up puts status and budget for every project in one view, built from the registry that already holds them. Scheduled digests land in inboxes showing who is on track and where a budget is heading, so the weekly reminder sends itself with the answer already attached instead of a manager chasing it. And a client-ready weekly progress summary is drafted for each project from the week's own entries, so a project manager sends it rather than assembling it by hand. Because your hours are ordinary list items in your own tenant, a Power BI report points straight at them, over data you already own, with nothing to export and no vendor copy to reconcile against.

The upgrade worth having

The entry tier gets your projects and your hours into your own tenant, correctly shaped and correctly owned. That is the foundation, and it is the part you buy first. The middle tier is where that owned data becomes the roll-up, the digest, and the summary that a delivery lead runs the week on. That is the upgrade worth having, and the reason it is worth having is the reason the whole thing is worth owning: the data underneath every one of those reports is yours, and it stays yours.

Get in touch, and we will point your own reporting at your own data.

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