How to Import Excel Timesheets into QuickBooks Online

Why Manual Entry Breaks Down

Manual timesheet entry into QBO has a few consistent failure points:

• It's slow. A 40-row timesheet takes 20–30 minutes when you account for navigation, dropdown selection, and verification.
• Typos in hours don't announce themselves. A 7.5 entered as 75 won't trigger a warning.
• The billable flag is easy to miss. If an entry goes in without it, it won't appear on the customer's next invoice run.
• There's no built-in duplicate check. If someone submits the same week twice, you may not notice until the invoice looks too high.

For small teams this is annoying. For bookkeepers managing multiple clients, it's a genuine operational risk.

The Import Approach

Rather than entering each row manually, you connect your QBO account to an import tool, download a pre-filled Excel template, fill it in with time data, and upload it. The tool pushes the entries directly into QBO as time activities — the same records QBO would create if you'd entered them manually, just without the manual work.

Time On It does this using QuickBooks Online's OAuth connection, so it reads your actual QBO data — employees, customers, service items, classes — and builds the template dropdowns from those live lists. You're not typing names; you're selecting from your exact QBO data.

Step by Step

1. Connect your QBO company. Click Connect to QuickBooks and authorise the OAuth connection. Time On It reads your employees, customers, service items, and classes — but does not store your financial data.
2. Download the template. The template is generated from your QBO data. Column dropdowns are populated with your actual employee names, customer names, and service items. There's no manual list maintenance.
3. Fill in the template. Each row is one time entry: employee, customer, service item, class, date, hours, description, and billable status. If you already have a weekly timesheet in Excel, copying the data across takes a few minutes.
4. Upload the file. Drag the completed file onto the upload screen. Time On It parses it, checks for duplicates against existing QBO entries, and shows you a summary before committing anything.
5. Review and confirm. You'll see a breakdown: how many entries will be imported, how many were already in QBO (duplicates, skipped automatically), and any rows with missing required fields.

What the Results Screen Shows

After upload, the results screen shows:

• Imported successfully — entries pushed to QBO as time activities.
• Already imported — duplicate entries detected and skipped, so you don't double-count hours.
• Skipped rows — rows missing a date, invalid date, zero hours, or already marked "Imported" in the Status column.
• Warnings — rows where employee or customer is filled but date or hours are missing. These are flagged, not silently dropped.

The template's Status column updates to "Imported" after a successful push, so if you re-upload the same file later, those rows are skipped automatically.