Smarter Hubstaff Reporting: Custom Reports, Real Use Cases, and Your Questions Answered

Reporting is where time tracking data starts paying for itself, and it’s also where a lot of people get stuck. Open a report for the first time and you’ll find filters, tables, group-by options, and enough columns to lose an afternoon in.

Hubstaff hosted a webinar to make all of that easier to navigate, built around a live demo of the custom time and activity report and the use cases our customers rely on most.

Presenting were Kate Kamenets, a product manager at Hubstaff, and Kayal Michel, our Customer Success Manager. Aubrey Nekvinda, Product Marketing Manager, hosted, and Cody Rogers, our Chief Product Officer, handled the audience Q&A.

You can watch the full recording below or read on for the key takeaways.

Start with the question you want answered

Cody opened with the advice he gives anyone getting into Hubstaff reporting: before you open a single report, write down the question you want it to answer.

The reports are flexible enough to slice your data almost any way you like, and a clear question tells you which filters, columns, and views are worth your time.

The attendee questions that came in made good examples: which projects earn the highest margin, whether bill rates and pay rates are set up correctly, and how billable hours compare to non-billable ones.

The 4 reports customers lean on daily

Kate opened her segment with the classics, the reports that cover most teams’ everyday needs:

• Amounts owed. Shows what each team member has earned based on tracked time and pay rates.
• Daily totals. A day-by-day snapshot of hours worked and earnings.
• Apps and URLs. A detailed overview of the apps and websites used during tracked time.
• Payments. A full breakdown of every payment, including rates, PTO, additions, and deductions.

Inside the custom time and activity report

Plenty of customers have asked for a way to go beyond the standard views, with reports they can customize and automate. The custom “Time and activity” report is the answer.

You’ll find it on the “All reports” page under “Popular reports”. Kate built one live to show what it can do:

• Choose your columns. She added break time, manual hours, and billable time, keeping only the data that mattered for her question.
• Apply custom filters. Beyond members and projects, you can filter on the metrics themselves. Kate demoed manual hours under one hour, billable time under one hour, and activity levels of at least 30%.
• Change the view. Grouping the data by member turned the report into a quick read on who was most productive that week.

Saving and scheduling took under a minute. Kate named the report, added her email and a subject line she’d recognize in her inbox, and set it to deliver every Friday, with daily, weekly, and monthly frequencies available.

Every saved report lives on the “Customized reports” page, where you can adjust filters, pause or restart delivery, and jump back in from the left navigation panel.

3 ways customers put reporting data to work

Kayal took over to share the use cases that come up most with the customers she works with:

• Payroll and compliance. Customers use the Time and Activity and Daily Totals Reports to calculate accurate wages with overtime, PTO, manual time, and holidays included, and to keep audit-ready records. For most of them, Hubstaff is the source of truth for what’s owed each pay period.
• Attendance tracking and shift compliance. The work sessions report shows every stretch between a timer start and stop, along with the project and activity level. The “Shift attendance” report flags who was on time, late, or absent for a scheduled shift.
• Project and client billing. With pay rates and bill rates set up, the “Time and Activity,” “Project Budgets,” and “Client Budgets” reports help validate billable hours and sharpen estimates. Sharing them with clients doubles as proof of work.

She also pointed out a small quality-of-life feature: a Favorites tab that pins starred reports to the top of your screen, so the ones you use daily are always one click away.

From four admins and a spreadsheet to one scheduled report

Kayal closed her segment with a customer she’s worked with for two years. The company has more than 400 team members, and payroll used to run on a spreadsheet maintained by four admins.

Each team member messaged in their hours at the end of the day, and the admins entered everything by hand: hours, breaks, pay rates, holidays, PTO, and overtime. Reconciling it all took two to three hours every 15-day pay period.

The fix was a Time and Activity Report grouped by date, capturing hours, activity levels, breaks, overtime, holidays, PTO, and pay rates in one place. It started as a download and now arrives on a schedule, with no need to even log in.

The results: four to five admin hours saved every month, manual entry errors gone entirely, and stronger client trust, because the numbers come straight from the platform instead of a hand-edited spreadsheet.

From the Q&A: Profitability, activity levels, and totals at a glance

Cody fielded questions throughout, and a few came up often enough to answer for everyone.

How do I see what a project or client is costing me?

Turn on the spent column in the Time and Activity Report, alongside billable time and bill rates. Hide everything else, and you get a clean answer to what you’re spending on a given client, project, person, or week.

How should I read low activity levels?

Treat activity as one metric among many, and read it over a full day or week rather than an hour at a time. A low stretch usually has an explanation, and someone who logged six hours of meetings that day was almost certainly working through the dip. Remember, your team sees the same numbers you do, so the read should feel fair, not like a gotcha.

Can I see totals without all the details?

Yes. Kayal demoed the collapse option live: one click reduces the report to total hours per date or per member, with all the row-level detail tucked away.

How do I know whether someone started on time?

If you schedule shifts in Hubstaff, the “Shift attendance” report shows on-time starts, late arrivals, and early departures automatically.

If you work from a rougher schedule, the Hubstaff Insights timeline gives you a visual scan of each person’s day, including starts, stops, idle time, and manual entries.

Ready to build your first custom report?

The fastest way to see how these reports fit your team is to book a demo.

You’ll get matched with a specialist who can help you set up the right reports, schedules, and views for your payroll, attendance, or billing workflow.