Getting Started with VibaCloud
Most timesheet tools hand you an empty grid and leave you to remember what you were doing last Tuesday afternoon. VibaCloud works the other way round. It reads the meetings and events that are already in your calendar and turns them into a draft timesheet you can tidy up in a few minutes. This guide takes you from a brand new account to your first submitted week.
What you'll need first
Not much. If you keep your work calendar in Microsoft (Outlook) or Google, you can connect it and let VibaCloud do the heavy lifting, and you can link both if your week is split across the two. When it reads a calendar it only ever reads it, so nothing here changes your real events, moves anything around, or sends invitations to anyone.
Don't use either, or simply prefer to type your time in yourself? That's completely fine. A connected calendar is optional, and you can build a full timesheet by hand instead. The guide to tracking time manually covers that route start to finish. The rest of this page assumes you're importing from a calendar.
1. Connect your calendar
Open the Import screen and pick Microsoft or Google. You'll be taken to the provider's own sign-in page, where you approve read-only access. Once you land back in VibaCloud, it's ready to pull your events in. If you connect a second provider later on, it links to the same account instead of starting a new one, so all your work stays together under a single login.
2. Import a week
Choose the week you want to work on and import it. In a single click, VibaCloud saves each event and creates a matching draft timesheet line. A 90-minute client call comes in as a 1.5 hour line, and that recurring Monday stand-up shows up too. All-day events are the one exception: rather than logging a full 24 hours, they use a default length you can set in Settings (it starts at eight hours), and you can adjust any of them by hand.
3. Assign projects and check your hours
Now head to the Draft Timesheet. It's a weekly grid with a row for each Organisation, Project and Task, and a column for every day from Monday to Sunday. Imported lines arrive untagged, so the main job is dropping each one onto the right project. The moment you do, VibaCloud fills in the organisation, whether that time is billable, and the hourly rate, all taken straight from the project. You never set rates row by row, which means there's a lot less to get wrong.
Did something that never made it into your calendar? Add a manual line directly in the grid and type the hours in yourself. Lunch-and-learns, a quick phone call, an hour of admin: it all belongs on the sheet.
4. Submit the week
Once the grid matches your week, submit it. Submitting freezes the hours, billable flags, rates and totals, so the numbers stay exactly as they were even if a project's rate changes months later. Spot a mistake after the fact? Reopen the week, make the fix, and submit again. Each reopen is recorded, so you always have a clear history of what changed and when.
A few tips for a smooth start
- Give your calendar events clear titles. They make tagging quicker because you can see at a glance what each line was.
- Import on the same day each week, Friday afternoon for a lot of people, so a week is never more than a few minutes of work.
- Set up your common projects before you start tagging. A short, tidy list is much faster to pick from.
- Don't forget the unbooked work. Manual lines exist precisely for the things that weren't a meeting.
Where to go next
That's the whole loop: connect, import, tag, submit. Once it's part of your routine it really does take minutes. When you're ready to go deeper, the guide on creating a timesheet from your calendar covers how to get clean imports, and filling out a timesheet correctly walks through the habits that keep your hours accurate.
