Streamlining Member Timesheets: A Guide to Efficient Time Tracking
Learn how to efficiently manage and update member timesheets with this comprehensive guide. Discover tips for syncing with office systems, ensuring transparency, and preparing for future reservations.
In this guide, we'll learn how to manage member timesheets using Google Drive and QuickBooks. The objective is to ensure accurate tracking of member reservations and enhance transparency between members and the office. We'll explore how to input reservation data into individual spreadsheets, color-code entries for clarity, and share these sheets with members securely. This process aims to streamline operations and provide members with a clear view of their reservations.
Let's get started
In Chrome, I created a bookmark for Google Drive and placed it on the far left of the bookmark bar. So let's go to the drive.
Clicking on that will take you directly to the starred area.
The first one is member time tracking. The other three—office forms, tours, and weddings—are synced with the office computer. Their location is listed as "my computer."
Any changes you make here will sync with the computer and vice versa. If you access the file explorer and go into office forms, any actions you take will directly affect what's in office forms on the drive.
Finally getting to the point, member time tracking is available now. You can find it in the drive, specifically in "My Drive" (but obviously, I "starred" it, so it's very quick to access)
Just to ensure there's a backup, this will prepare a download for me. I'm glad I'm doing this because we really need a backup. I've spent a lot of time on this. Anyway now you can open up the time tracking folder.
If you enter here, you'll find a spreadsheet for each member.
Each member has their own, listed under their last name.
For example, if I go into QuickBooks and pull up Axelrod's account, I can see she has a reservation in 2025.
Back in chrome, double-click on her spreadsheet to open it in a new tab.
Most of these have four individual sheets, which you can see at the bottom. You'll find the current year and the following year.
I might show you that at the end. For now, let's focus on what's important. The main task is to add member reservations that already exist onto these spreadsheets (for 2025 mostly, if not entirely - I don't think there are any 2026 reservations yet...WAIT, there are, but only one or two, like Weinraub). Overall, this project isn't major and it's a low priority, yet I'm excited about it. After talking with MJ today and seeing its importance to her, I'm even more enthusiastic.
This is essentially what we've been doing in the green book. However, I've arranged it so each member has their own copy.
This allows the member to view their own time without seeing other members' time.
This is about transparency, and I believe it really touched MJ. It impressed upon me that this is meaningful, as members have never experienced this level of transparency with the office. I think it's beneficial for both the members and us. I'm excited to share it. If you could address a few members' reservations, it would be very helpful.
Once these are ready, I plan to send an email to the members to inform them about it. I'll show you this quickly.
I will include the "Streamline Your Reservations" tutorial in the email.
I'm sending that to the members. It's going over this as well, but it's directed at the members. I'll likely revise it now that I've decided to remove the one sheet. But I digress...
Anyways, if you do anything, all I'd ask is that you go to QuickBooks, find the member, and check their reservations. Then just put them in the timesheets.
I'm copying the notation and then heading back into the spreadsheet.
Then I'm gonna paste it in here...now, I haven't decided yet if this is the final PLACEMENT for the notation, I might change it later. I'm not sure where it looks best. For now, I've been going to the N column though.
There is a small separation that way, and then I'll paste in the notation.
Press the X button at the top right to do that.
I have also extended that column to make it look like this.
I would color code that. Let's pick a color and make it red.
Now, I go to the week I plan to use from her share. In this case, I'm using the summer dates.
You can do it in a couple of ways.
You can simply type.
For example, if you type 6/28/25, you can then click into the next field.
Now, I want you to look at that pure wizardry.
It automatically formatted it as 2025, even though I just typed 25. 🧙♂️
Usually I just type 6/29/25, then press the Tab key on the keyboard, located just above Caps Lock, to skip to the next field.
Type 6/30/25, then press Tab to proceed, etc.
Alternatively, you can double-click on the field itself.
This will bring up a small calendar since these are formatted as a date field.
You can go through the months in this way.
Oh! I didn't realize that! 👀
It remembered the month - oh, this is better. 🧙♂️
Oh, I actually really like that. (I was geeking out about this simple wizardry)
That's amazing. It remembers that I was in July and makes it really fast. (I got excited and started shouting into the microphone)
At this point, if you click on night one (in our example 6/28/25), hold the shift key on your keyboard and then press night seven...you can change the text color of all 7 nights.
I will choose red.
All right. If I had another reservation to add here, I would make it blue, green, or purple.
That's it. This makes it easy to see what they've reserved. We log the exact nights she is staying because if she has seven nights allotted for the summer, we need to know each specific night. This allows us to review later and ensure they are correctly allocated.
Anything populated to the left will count as one. If all seven nights are used, it will show seven nights used and zero nights remaining here.
This is what it's doing.
I'm not sure if it's been doing that on all of them.
So - it's not a big process, except for some members who have many bookings. I literally just finished this one because she didn't have any other reservations. That was all I had to do for hers.
If I check her account from 2025 onwards, it only shows Longfellow in the summer, and there's nothing for 2026 yet.
You can see it's blank. The other sheets are just informational, and I don't do anything with them. At this point, if I were doing more, I can simply close out, go to Bailey (next member down the list), and pull up Barb Bailey in QuickBooks to check her bookings.
There's also the capital contribution, but there's no reservation activity at all. So, at that point, what are you going to do? You're going to close her spreadsheet. Done! 😎
You're done, so that's good. As you can imagine, Fred Beltz will be a bigger one, right?
He's gotta have much more time than that...
... look at that cat.
