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:

1. On your SharePoint 2010 site, go to Site Settings, Site Features, and activate the “Group Work Lists” feature.
2. Open your site in SharePoint Designer 2010.  Click the File Menu, click Add Item on the left, and click More Lists.
   
3. Click the Time Card list, and click the Create button on the right.
   
4. After creating the Time Card list, repeat steps 1 and 2 and create a Holidays list.
   
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. In your time card in the browser, click the Time Card tab in the ribbon.
   
8. 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.
   
9. 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.
10. 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!