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CtrlTime

Time tracking where the work happens

Hours recorded and approved inside M‑Files

People put their hours in a calendar inside M‑Files, on the customer or project they worked for. The week's timesheet goes to a manager for approval. Approved hours feed the payroll and the invoices, and show each project against its budget.

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A CtrlPortals time calendar in M-Files in the week view, Monday to Wednesday from 8 in the morning, with each time entry as a block from its start to its end time, customer time in green and internal time in blue, and a legend of the two kinds underneath.

From hours worked to hours paid

Hours are entered once, and everyone further down the line works from the same entries.

  1. Record

    Everyone books their hours in a calendar, against the customer or internal project they worked on.

  2. Approve

    A manager or administrator gets each person's week as one timesheet and approves or rejects it.

  3. Pay and invoice

    Approved hours become one list for salary payments and another for client invoices.

  4. Follow the budget

    The time spent on each project is compared with its budget plan.

  5. The hours stay in M‑Files

    Every approved hour is a record in the vault, on the customer or project it was worked for.

Your week is already assembled

Entries are grouped into their week automatically, so there is nothing to gather at the end of the week. The week reads as one timesheet, day by day, with customer time and internal time told apart by colour.

  • Sent with one action — One action sends the week to a manager or administrator for approval.
  • Corrected where it was recorded — Edit or delete an entry if it has to change, and send the week again.
Week 41 of one person's time entries as a list grouped by day, Monday and Tuesday showing, with the kind of time and the work type of each entry.

See a week recorded, sent and approved

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Hours per project, against the plan

Because approved hours are kept in M‑Files, the reports read them where they are, with nothing to export first. Each project's hours can be followed against its budget plan, the week's totals stay in view, and the time is split by kind of work.

  • Project managers see the drift early — A project that is running past its plan shows it while there is still time to act.
  • Every bar opens the entries — Any bar or total opens the entries behind it, so when someone asks where a figure came from, you can show them.
A CtrlPortals time-reporting dashboard: four tiles for registered, customer, internal and this week's hours, a bar chart of registered hours per customer project against the plan, and a doughnut chart of hours by work type.

One set of hours for payroll, invoices and reports

Payroll works from approved hours

Approved hours become the payroll list, laid out in the fields and format your payroll uses.

A project's hours exported for the invoice

Export all the hours of a project when it is time to invoice, in the fields and format your invoicing runs on.

Analyse the hours like any other data

M‑Files reporting and analytics work on the hours as they do on the rest of the vault.

What it needs to run

  • Any M‑Files edition, in M‑Files Cloud or on-premise, with M‑Files 25.1 or later on the server and in the clients.
  • M‑Files licences for the users.
  • A CtrlPortals subscription. CtrlTime runs on CtrlPortals, so read the requirements on the CtrlPortals page as well.
  • A configured Person object. We recommend the free user synchronisation module from the M‑Files Compliance Kit.
  • Employee, Time and Week objects, set up as described in the CtrlTime documentation. Existing ones can be kept after a few checks, described in the questions below.

The set-up guide is in the CtrlTime documentation.

Tell us how you record time today

Say how hours are recorded and approved now, and who needs them afterwards. In a demo we take a week in CtrlTime from the calendar to approval.

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Questions about CtrlTime

What can we record time on?
Any kind of record in M‑Files: a document, a customer, an internal project or a customer project. You record the time in a calendar shown by day, week or month, and it stays on the record it belongs to, not in a separate system beside M‑Files.
How does a week get approved?
Each person's entries are grouped into a week automatically, and the week goes to a manager or administrator as one timesheet. In the example workflow it moves from Draft to Sent to Admin, then to Approved or Rejected, and its entries move with it. The colours show where a week stands: green approved, orange pending, red rejected. Entries can be edited or deleted, so a week that comes back is corrected and sent again.
Do we need CtrlPortals as well?
Yes. CtrlTime is built on CtrlPortals: the calendar, the weekly timesheet and the reports are all CtrlPortals screens inside M‑Files. The same installation can show your other M‑Files overviews too.
We already have employee, time or week objects. Can we keep them?
Yes. The compatibility notes in the CtrlTime documentation say what to check, such as the data types and the week set-up. Each user needs one Employee object pointing to their user account.
Can we run payroll and invoicing from it?
CtrlTime prepares the hours for both: one list for salary payments and one for client invoices, with the fields, filters and format you choose. All the hours of a project can be exported, for example for invoicing.
Can we see the hours on a project against the plan?
Yes. Time spent on each project is followed against the budget plan, and the reporting dashboard plots the registered hours. A work type on each recording lets a plot show the time spent per kind of activity.
Which M‑Files clients does it run in?
CtrlTime's screens are CtrlPortals dashboards and portals, so they run in the new and the classic M‑Files desktop and web clients, with the same functionality in each.
What do the EU rules on recording working time ask for?
Since a 2019 ruling by the EU Court of Justice, every employer in the EU has to record its employees' working hours. How to track time and stay compliant in the EU sets out what the rules ask for. CtrlTime records the hours in M‑Files, on the customer or project they belong to.
How is it licensed, and is there a trial?
The trial runs 30 days, like every CtrlDocs product. The CtrlPortals subscription it runs on is licensed per normalised M‑Files user: read-only counts 0.5, a named user 1, a concurrent user 4. For CtrlTime's own terms, ask us: we answer the same working day.

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