QuickBooks Timesheet Integration: What Your Options Are

QBO doesn't have a native spreadsheet import for time — so businesses end up improvising. Here are the three realistic options and when each one makes sense.

Option 1: QBO Native Time Tracking

QuickBooks Online includes basic time entry. You can log hours against an employee, customer, and service item directly in QBO, and those entries feed into invoicing and payroll.

The limitations are real though. There's no bulk entry interface — each row is its own form. There's no way to paste in a week's worth of data. And if your team records time outside QBO (which most small teams do), you're still manually transcribing from wherever the time actually lives.

QuickBooks also sells QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) as a separate product for live time capture — GPS tracking, clock in/out, shift scheduling. It integrates with QBO but is a separate subscription and assumes your team is capturing time in real time, not retrospectively from timesheets.

Best for: teams that want to capture time live in a dedicated time-tracking app and have staff comfortable using another piece of software daily.

Option 2: Third-Party Time Tracking Apps

A range of apps — Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, Deputy — integrate with QBO and can push time entries across. These are solid tools if your team is already using them for time capture.

The problem is the assumption built into this option: that your team's time already lives in one of these apps. If time is collected via manager-submitted Excel files, or from external staff who send in their hours each week, a live-capture app doesn't solve the actual problem. You'd need to get everyone onto a new system first, which is its own project.

Best for: teams that are starting fresh and want a single system for both capturing and reporting time.

Option 3: Spreadsheet Import

This option starts from where many teams actually are: time is collected in Excel, either because staff submit timesheets that way, because an operations team compiles hours from multiple sources, or simply because it's what works for the team's workflow.

A spreadsheet import tool takes that Excel file and pushes the rows into QBO as time activities — the same records QBO would contain if you'd entered them manually. No change to how time is collected. No new app for staff to learn. Just a faster path from spreadsheet to QBO.

Best for: teams already collecting time in Excel who want the data in QBO for invoicing and reporting without changing their collection process.

Why Spreadsheet Import Suits Excel-Based Teams

The "switch to a time-tracking app" answer is only right if you can actually get your whole team onto it. For many businesses — particularly those with part-time staff, external contractors, or operations teams collating time from multiple sources — that transition isn't realistic.

Spreadsheet import doesn't require any change in how time is collected. It handles the last step: getting that data into QBO cleanly and without manual re-entry.

How Time On It Works

Time On It connects to QuickBooks Online via OAuth and reads your QBO data — employees, customers, service items, classes — to generate a pre-filled Excel template. Dropdowns in the template contain your actual QBO data, so there's no freeform text entry that could mismatch a name.

Fill in the template with time data, upload it, and Time On It imports the entries directly to QBO. Duplicate detection runs automatically — if a row already exists in QBO, it's skipped, not re-imported.

With plans from $5/month and a 14-day free trial, it's the lowest-friction path from Excel to QBO for teams that want to stay in spreadsheets.