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Using the Time spent insight in Dext

The Time spent insight shows how effort spreads across your practice, clients, and team, to support planning and resourcing.

Written by Alexander

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.

Time spent page showing the Overall time spent, Trends, and Documents over time tiles

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.

Time spent filter panel showing Managed, Bookkeeping frequency, Account managers, Teams, Locations, and Role filters

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.

Overall time spent page showing a Total time by day bar chart with Time by team and Time by location bars below

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.

Trends heatmap displaying time spent per day by month with colour intensity and an Include weekends toggle

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.

Documents over time chart showing monthly bars for time spent and a line for published documents

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.

Time spent on clients tile showing Most hours selected and a bar chart of client names and time spent

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.

Time spent on clients page showing a daily time chart and a client table with Published documents and Time per document

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.

Individual client page displaying annual activity heatmap, Documents over time chart, and colleague activity charts and table

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

Colleagues' activity tile displaying Most active colleagues with a bar chart of names and total time spent

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.

Colleagues' activity page displaying a table of colleagues with time spent, days active, and number of clients worked on, plus filter icon

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.

Individual colleague page displaying annual activity heatmap, Clients worked on bar chart, Hourly Breakdown graph, and client summary table with filter icon in the top right

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.

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