The Time spent insight shows where effort goes 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 5 tiles:
Overall time spent
Trends
Documents over time
Time spent on clients
Colleagues' activity
Each tile moves from a high-level overview to deeper analysis.
Note: 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. To review user roles and permissions, go to Roles and permissions in Dext
Access the Time spent insight
To open the Time spent insight, go to Insights and select Time spent.
The 5 tiles stack vertically on the page. Scroll down to see Time spent on clients and Colleagues' activity below Documents over time.
From the main page of the Time spent insight, select Check details on any tile to drill down further.
Use filters in Time spent
Use the filter icon in the top right corner to filter data across all tiles and detail views.
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 your practice spends and how that effort is spread.
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
Document totals, split into manually published and auto-published
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 spreads 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 spent changes across weeks and months.
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.
Documents over time
The Documents over time tile shows how time spent and published documents track together across your practice, by month.
Use this view to compare document output with time spent and spot months where the two don't align.
Select Check details to open Time spent on clients, where published documents and time per document are broken down by client.
Time spent on clients
The Time spent on clients tile shows which clients account for 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, with a supporting table below.
You can:
Compare clients over time
See how many days each client was active
View active users per client
See published documents and time per document for each client
Review overall portfolio balance
Level 3 - Individual client detail
Select a row in the table to open a specific client and view a deeper analysis.
This page includes:
Annual activity heatmap showing time spent on this client across the year
Documents over time chart showing published documents and time spent together, by month
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 contributes effort, monitor workload changes, and prepare for client reviews or repricing discussions.
Colleagues' activity
The Colleagues' activity tile shows how effort spreads 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
Select a colleague in the table to see a detailed view of their 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.











