Out of Box Timecard and Holiday Lists
In SharePoint 2010, there’s a little-known built in feature. There are list templates that can be used for time card tracking, with a holiday calendar that ties into the time card.
Here’s how to get to it:
- On your SharePoint 2010 site, go to Site Settings, Site Features, and activate the “Group Work Lists” feature.
- Open your site in SharePoint Designer 2010. Click the File Menu, click Add Item on the left, and click More Lists.
![ch5[119]](https://i0.wp.com/wonderlaura.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/105-ch5119_7f1a018a.png?resize=344%2C405 "ch5[119]")
- Click the Time Card list, and click the Create button on the right.
![ch5[120]](https://i0.wp.com/wonderlaura.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/105-ch5120_7f1a018a.png?resize=176%2C74 "ch5[120]")
- After creating the Time Card list, repeat steps 1 and 2 and create a Holidays list.
![ch5[121]](https://i0.wp.com/wonderlaura.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/105-ch5121_7f1a018a.png?resize=176%2C74 "ch5[121]")
- Now go to your SharePoint site in the browser, and open the Time Card. Pretty fancy! There you’ll see what I’ve shown at the top of this post, a fully functioning time card system. Try entering a few dates and times in it, and you’ll see that it automatically calculates the number of hours, etc.
- Go to your new Holidays list and enter a couple of holidays as non-working days. Then when you go to your Time Card, you’ll see that it has put those days in yellow just like weekends.
- In your time card in the browser, click the Time Card tab in the ribbon.
![ch5[122]](https://i0.wp.com/wonderlaura.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/105-ch5122_7f1a018a.png?resize=392%2C122 "ch5[122]")
- Click Time Card Settings. There are several other items that can be defined here, such as when are working hours. The Non work days view actually comes from the other (Holidays) list that you created. If there is no Holidays list, this drop-down is blank.
![ch5[123]](https://i0.wp.com/wonderlaura.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/105-ch5123_7f1a018a.png?resize=338%2C478 "ch5[123]")
- By default, Calculate details is set to No. After you change it to Yes, you’ll be able to go in and tweak the times of each of the listed hours like morning and afternoon. After it has been changed to Yes, and you go back to the main view of the list, there will be several more columns in the view.
- To get to the list settings in the browser, I clicked the My Time Card view, clicked Configure Views for this Location, and clicked “List Settings” in the breadcrumb trail at the top.
Pretty neat little discovery! Have fun trying out the built in time card system!
Thanks Laura great post we will implement this at Twynham rather than use a spreadsheet for holidays. Thanks Again Dave
Thanks Laura, This is indeed a little hidden gem although I feel it will need some additional customisation before it meets my org’s needs. Just a quick question do you have to click save each time you enter something? I am noticing that as I go between the start time to end time the data I enter disappears unless I click save before focusing the cursor on the next text box!
Simply Good
Dave, I haven’t seen values disappear like that in my environment, I was able to enter values in several fields before saving.
Thanks Laura! I found this somehow and couldn’t remember how I found it! I was looking everywhere in the browser and it was driving me crazy. In response to Dave Pritchard’s comment, my numbers disappeared unless I put the colon and minutes in the time fields.
This doesnt allow me to make any changes in Sharepoint foundation, did you try this on sharepoint foundation?
Thanks, I would have never found this feature! Any recommendations for creating a workflow for management approval at the end of each month?
Richie, No, I haven’t tried that. Jon, if you’d need to approve a big chunk of items all at once, that would be pretty complicated, and I don’t know how. Most workflows only run on one item at a time.
Hi Laura – I’ve put a link to this page on our round-up of all your options for doing TimeSheets in SharePoint http://blog.pentalogic.net/2011/11/sharepoint-timesheets-free-solutions/
Laura, I do not have time card or holidays in my options under more list settings. What would cause this?
After installing on SP2010Ent (14.0.6029.1000) I am getting a error. Tracking down the correlation ID gives me “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields” This is only with the mytcard.aspx; Disphol.aspx works just fine.
I am getting an error on the sharepoint logs. “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields.” “System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields. at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.GetListItemDataWithCallback2(IListItemSqlClient pSqlClient, String bstrUrl, String bstrListName, String bstrViewName, String bstrViewXml, SAFEARRAYFLAGS fSafeArrayFlags, ISP2DSafeArrayWriter pSACallback, ISPDataCallback pPagingCallback, ISPDataCallback pPagingPrevCallback, ISPDataCallback pFilterLinkCallback, ISPDataCallback pSchemaCallback, ISPDataCallback pRowCountCallback, Boolean& pbMaximalView) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.GetListItemDataWithCallback2(IListItemSqlClient pSqlClient, String bstrUrl, String bstrListName, String bstrViewName, String bstrViewXml, SAFEARRAYFLAGS fSafeArrayFlags, ISP2DSafeArrayWriter pSACallback, ISPDataCallback pPagingCallback, ISPDataCallback pPagingPrevCallback, ISPDataCallback pFilterLinkCallback, ISPDataCallback pSchemaCallback, ISPDataCallback pRowCountCallback, Boolean& pbMaximalView)” The vacation page works fine, only the MyTcard is erroring like this.
Carole, All I can think of is that the feature needs to be activated. (Step 1). Ken, I don’t know, I’ve never gotten that error. All I did was discover this feature, try it out and write a blog post about it. I haven’t used it since.
Hi laura ! I have the same problem, like Carole. But i’ve activated Feature in Step 1. I can only create few lists from all:
Telephone call list, location and vocabulart list IME, and i can’t create holiday list and time card list.
I simply see no new group lists from new list/library creating web-interface , but i can find it from SP designer. When i click “create” on them, nothing happens 🙁 Have you any idea about that fact?
This feature is exactly what I am looking for – if you create the list, each user who has permissions to get to the site gets their own view of the timecard which nicely stores whatever data they input.
What I need, however, is a way to provide a higher level view such that someone who administers the site collection can see ALL the timecards for all the users that have filled them out and then generate a report on it (i.e. user enters timecard data, workflow kicks off approval process, approver approves, then HR wants a report of all the approved timecards). Has anybody done anything like this?
Nikita,
No, I’ve never seen that happen.
Bob,
Can you just use the built in content approval functionality for that? What do you mean by “report”? Try SSRS?
Hi Laura,
I implemented it on my office 365 sharepoint server, thanks. how to i see all the time cards for all the employees? currently i can only see my own.
You guys, if you want to see all time cards, you have to go into the list settings and scroll down to the bottom and create a new view from there. That should let you see all of them.
Hi Laura,
Do you know where could I read more about this feature?
In reply to Udions comment, I tried to add the Time Card list but do not see it in the More List Templates Section ? How did you find it ?
Thanks.
Laura, Question: My environment disables the use of SP designer. Is there anothe way to create this list? maybe using web services?
Robert,
No, I thought that was strange, which is why I blogged about it.
Lee,
All I can think is you didn’t do step 1. Other than that, I don’t know.
Max,
No, that’s strange, isn’t it? I don’t know of any other way.
Great blog Laura! Mine has created a default of 1:00 in the Break column and I would like it to be zero. I also would like to change the choices in the Vacation drop down. Does anyone know how to do this as you cant do it in the settings for the list? I changed it in the parent TimeCard content type on our top level but it didnt change in the actual time sheet.
This is a great post. This is exactly what we’re looking for, but I am trying to edit the form (like remove certain columns and add others) but not having any luck. Any suggestions on how to add a simple field (like “site” so we know what site the employee was working at)?
Thanks again.
Interesting, its not on office365, (even in E3 plan).. hm…
Suzi and Moneer,
Unfortunately, this solution doesn’t appear to be very customizable at all.
Laura, I have everything working fine – including on an office 365 implementation (you activate the same way) but I can’t see how to create/edit the views. I can’t see any wya to get into the configure views option. Any tips?
I agree with the others, i need an administrator view to view all time cards for employees for payroll for a view of two weeks.
This is great, but not very useful on a management level.
Please help.
The time entered disappears if it is entered as an integer, i.e., 8,9,10, etc. instead of 8:00, 9:00, etc.
Hi everyone,
Sorry, but I pretty much discovered this list type, wrote a blog about it, and then didn’t really ever use it. I don’t know of any way to do an admin view or do any kind of modifications to it. You pretty much get what you get and it’s pretty limited.
Hi
Is there a way to use this Holiday List on a Calendar? where you it’ll mark the listed days as a non working day on a calendar instead of a time card?
thanks!
Rob,
No, it’s very proprietary. Would be nice, though.
Does this exist in SharePoint 2013?
While neither the Fab40 or Timecard that Laura refers to here exists in SharePoint 2013/SharePoint Online, I found another solution where there is a timecard solution buried DEEP within SharePoint via the Content Types (http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/154/t/30595.aspx) and it works perfectly. I did adapt a little as all the default fields are text fields so I updateD the Content Type to have Date/Time and number fields and also to calculate the hours per day via a calculated field. I also added a small workflow that allows for status of “Not Submitted”, “Pending Approval” and “Approved”. This allows the timecard to be sent to a manager for approval when the user changes from “Not Submitted” to “Pending Approval” and stops them from making further edits by changing their permissions to Read Only on that record so user cannot change after submitting. Also allows manager to easily filter to see what is pending. There are commercial solutions out there but not too many for SharePoint Online – and nothing great in the SharePoint Store – so this solution will work for us.
Very cool, thanks for sharing this, Rosalyn!
This feature doesn’t appear on my 2010 sharepoint
Hazo,
That’s strange, but it doesn’t surprise me too much. Mine only showed from within SP Designer, and then in 2013 it’s completely gone.