The Time spent insight helps you understand where effort is being spent across your practice. It brings together daily trends, client workload, and colleague activity in one place so you can plan capacity and support pricing decisions.
The Time spent insight is structured into 4 tiles:
Overall time spent
Trends
Time spent on clients
Colleagues' activity
Each tile moves from a high-level overview to deeper analysis.
Important: Time spent is currently in Beta and available only to selected firms. During this phase, it is automatically enabled for participating accounts.
Before you start
The Time spent insight is available to accounting and bookkeeping practices on the Practice Advanced plan.
Only Practice Admin and Client Admin users can access it.
Tip: To review user roles and permissions, see Understanding roles and permissions in Dext.
Access the Time spent insight
To open the Time spent insight, go to Insights and select Time spent.
From the main page of the Time spent insight, you can select Check details on tiles to drill down further.
Use filters in Time spent
You can filter data across all tiles and detail views using the filter icon in the top right corner.
Available filters include:
Time frame (custom date range, last 7 days, last 30 days)
Managed (Practice or Client)
Account managers
Teams
Locations
Role
After selecting filters, choose Apply to update the data. Select Reset to clear all filters.
Filters apply consistently across:
Overall time spent
Trends
Time spent on clients
Colleagues' activity
Individual client and colleague detail pages
Use filters to focus on specific teams, roles, locations, or time periods.
Overall time spent
The Overall time spent tile shows how much time is being spent across your practice and how that effort is distributed.
Level 1 - Practice overview
At this level, you see summary metrics for the selected period:
Total time spent
Average time per colleague
Time spent by team
Time spent by location
Time spent by role
This view gives you a quick snapshot of workload across teams, roles, and locations so you can spot imbalance and concentration of effort.
Level 2 - Distribution and daily trends
The detailed view shows how time changes day to day and how it is distributed across teams and locations.
You can see:
Total time by day
Team contribution
Location contribution
Use this view to identify peak periods, compare team contribution, and support resourcing decisions.
Trends
The Trends tile shows how time changes over time.
Level 1 - Heatmap view
This view displays a heatmap of time spent per day by team over recent months.
Darker shading represents higher time spent.
This view helps you quickly spot busy and quiet periods, seasonal patterns, and sustained pressure on specific teams.
There is currently no further drill-down for Trends. It is designed for pattern recognition rather than detailed analysis.
Time spent on clients
The Time spent on clients tile shows you which clients are driving the most or least effort.
Level 1 - Client highlights
At this level, you can toggle between:
Most hours
Least hours
This highlights the top 5 clients in each category.
Use this view to identify high- and low-effort clients and inform pricing or scope review conversations.
Level 2 - Full client analysis
The detailed client view shows time distribution across clients and a supporting table.
You can:
Compare clients over time
See how many days each client was active
View active users per client
Review overall portfolio balance
Level 3 - Individual client detail
By clicking on a row from the table, you can open a specific client to view a deeper analysis.
This page includes:
Annual activity heatmap showing time spent on this client across the year
Colleagues' daily duration for last 7 days chart
Colleagues' overall time spent bar chart
A table showing:
Colleague name
Total time spent
Days active
Use this view to understand who is contributing effort, monitor workload changes, and prepare for client reviews or repricing discussions.
Colleagues' activity
The Colleagues' activity tile shows how effort is distributed across your team.
This supports workload balance and capacity planning - not performance evaluation.
Level 1 - Activity highlights
At this level, you can toggle between:
Most active
Least active
Use this view to spot workload imbalance and support fair capacity planning across your team.
Level 2 - Team breakdown table
The detailed Colleagues’ activity view shows the time spent by each colleague.
This view helps you distribute work more fairly, plan capacity, and identify pressure points.
Level 3 - Individual colleague detail
When you open a specific colleague from the table, you can see a detailed view of that colleague’s activity across clients.
This page includes:
Annual activity heatmap showing the colleague’s time spent across the year
Clients worked on bar chart showing time spent per client
Hourly Breakdown graph showing when work typically happens during the day
A table showing:
Client name
Total time spent
Days active
Use this view to review workload patterns, understand client effort, identify peak hours, and support 1:1 capacity discussions.