Why Manual Time Tracking Is Costing Your Team More Than You Think
Imagine this: It’s Friday afternoon, and instead of wrapping up your week’s meaningful work, you’re clicking through screens, copying data from Jira, and manually entering hours into your timesheet system. Again. Every cell you fill represents time you could have spent solving real problems, innovating, or simply enjoying your weekend sooner.
You’re not alone. Across organizations worldwide, talented professionals spend countless hours on repetitive tasks that create zero value. The good news? Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can eliminate this burden entirely.
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through building your first UiPath automation bot from scratch. You’ll discover how to transform a tedious, error-prone weekly ritual into a seamless, automated process that runs while you focus on work that actually matters. Whether you’re an IT manager exploring automation opportunities, a business analyst seeking efficiency gains, or a developer curious about RPA, this step-by-step tutorial will equip you with practical skills you can apply immediately.
Understanding RPA and UiPath: Your Digital Workforce
Robotic Process Automation represents a fundamental shift in how we approach repetitive digital work. Rather than humans performing the same mouse clicks and keyboard entries day after day, RPA software bots execute these actions with perfect consistency and speed.
Think of RPA as creating a digital colleague who never gets tired, never makes transcription errors, and works happily through lunch breaks. These bots excel at rule-based tasks that follow predictable patterns such as extracting data from emails and updating databases, downloading reports and reformatting them for distribution, filling out web forms based on structured input data, and sending automated notifications when specific conditions are met.
UiPath has emerged as the leading RPA platform, trusted by enterprises across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and the public sector. What sets UiPath apart is its accessibility. The platform uses intuitive drag-and-drop workflows that make automation accessible to non-programmers, offers rapid prototyping capabilities that let you test ideas in hours rather than weeks, scales seamlessly from individual desktop automation to enterprise-wide deployment, and supports both attended automation that assists users in real-time and unattended automation that runs independently in the background.
The result is simple yet powerful: you build a digital worker that handles your repetitive tasks while you focus on strategic, creative, and high-value activities.
The Real Cost of Manual Timesheet Entry
Time tracking should be straightforward, but reality tells a different story. In our organization, every team member uses Jira to log hours spent on various projects and tasks. While Jira serves our project management needs well, it doesn’t integrate with OpenAir, our company’s invoicing and resource management platform.
This disconnect creates a weekly ritual that looks deceptively simple on paper but proves frustrating in practice. Each team member must log into Jira and generate a worklog report for the week, export or manually copy that data into Excel for formatting, log into OpenAir and navigate to their timesheet section, manually enter each row of time data into the corresponding project and task fields, and double-check every entry to prevent billing errors and project tracking mistakes.
The hidden costs accumulate quickly. What appears to be a 15-minute task actually consumes significantly more time when you account for context switching between applications, formatting inconsistencies that require cleanup, and the mental energy required for accuracy verification.
Beyond the time investment, manual entry introduces systematic risks. Typos in hour values can lead to incorrect billing and client disputes. Mismatched project codes create reporting inaccuracies that cascade through resource planning. Copy-paste errors corrupt data integrity across systems. When you multiply these challenges across an entire team working on multiple projects, the inefficiency becomes staggering.
Perhaps most frustrating is the opportunity cost. Every hour spent on administrative data entry is an hour not spent on development, strategy, innovation, or customer value creation. The team’s expensive expertise gets wasted on tasks that could be handled by automation.
Building Your Automated Solution: A Complete Guide
I designed an end-to-end UiPath automation that eliminates manual timesheet entry entirely. The bot reads worklog data from Jira, processes it intelligently, and submits everything to OpenAir without human intervention. Here’s exactly how I built it.
Setting Up Your Development Environment
Before building any automation, you need the right foundation. Start by downloading UiPath Studio Community Edition from the official UiPath website. The Community Edition provides full functionality for learning and personal projects at no cost.
Once installed, launch UiPath Studio and navigate to the Manage Packages section. You’ll need to install three essential activity packages. UiPath.Excel.Activities enables reading from and writing to Excel files, which we’ll use to process the exported Jira data. UiPath.UIAutomation.Activities provides all the browser and application interaction capabilities needed to automate the OpenAir web interface. UiPath.Mail.Activities allows your bot to send email notifications confirming successful completion.
Create a new Process project and name it something descriptive like “TimesheetAutomation.” This project will contain your entire workflow.
Understanding three fundamental concepts will accelerate your development. Activities are pre-built actions that perform specific tasks like clicking buttons, reading files, or sending emails. Variables store dynamic data that changes during execution, such as the list of worklogs you’re processing. Selectors are the mechanism UiPath uses to identify specific UI elements in applications and web pages.
Designing the Automation Workflow
The automation follows a logical sequence that mirrors the manual process but executes it with speed and precision.
Phase 1: Extracting Jira Data
While UiPath can interact directly with Jira through its REST API, I chose a simpler approach for the initial implementation. Each week, I export my worklogs from Jira as an Excel file using Jira’s built-in reporting features. I filter by the current week, select the relevant fields including project name, task description, hours logged, and work date, then export the results to a standardized Excel template.
This semi-automated approach reduces complexity while still delivering significant value. As your automation matures, you can enhance this step with API integration for fully hands-off operation.
Phase 2: Reading and Processing Excel Data
The bot begins by opening the exported Excel file using the Excel Application Scope activity. This activity establishes a connection to the file and ensures it’s properly closed after processing, preventing file locking issues. Within this scope, the Read Range activity loads all the worklog data into a DataTable variable, which is essentially a structured table stored in memory.
Excel Application Scope: "C:\Timesheets\JiraWorklogs.xlsx"
Read Range: "Sheet1" → Output: dt_Worklogs
This DataTable becomes the foundation for all subsequent processing. Each row represents one worklog entry that needs to be submitted to OpenAir.
Phase 3: Authenticating with OpenAir
The bot launches a browser session using the Open Browser activity, pointing to your organization’s OpenAir login page. I recommend using Chrome or Edge for better stability and selector reliability. The automation then locates the username field using a selector and types your credentials using the Type Into activity. The same process applies to the password field, followed by clicking the login button.
Open Browser: "https://openair.company.com/login"
Type Into: username_field → "yourUsername"
Type Into: password_field → "yourPassword"
Click: login_button
For production use, consider implementing credential management through UiPath Orchestrator’s Asset system rather than hardcoding credentials in your workflow. This enhances security and simplifies credential updates.
Phase 4: Iterating Through Worklogs and Submitting Entries
This is where the automation delivers its greatest value. Using a For Each Row activity, the bot processes every entry in your worklog DataTable. For each row, it navigates to the appropriate project and task within OpenAir’s interface, enters the hours worked in the correct field, adds any description or notes from Jira, and saves the entry before moving to the next one.
For Each Row in dt_Worklogs
Type Into: project_field → row("Project").ToString
Type Into: task_field → row("Task").ToString
Type Into: hours_field → row("Hours").ToString
Type Into: description_field → row("Description").ToString
Click: save_button
Delay: 2 seconds
The key to reliability lies in robust selectors. Because many web applications use dynamically generated element IDs, your selectors need to be flexible. Use wildcards and attribute-based selection rather than relying solely on IDs. For example, instead of targeting an element by its specific ID that might change, target it by its label text or aria attributes that remain consistent.
"<webctrl aaname='Project*' tag='INPUT' />"
Adding short delays between entries prevents overwhelming the server and gives the interface time to respond, which is especially important for web applications with slower response times.
Phase 5: Confirmation and Notification
Once all entries are processed, the automation sends a summary email confirming completion. This provides peace of mind and creates an audit trail of when the automation ran.
Send Outlook Mail Message
To: "yourmanager@company.com"
Subject: "Weekly Timesheets Submitted - [Current Date]"
Body: "Your Jira worklogs have been successfully entered into OpenAir.
Total entries processed: [EntryCount]
Total hours submitted: [TotalHours]"
You can enhance this notification by attaching a summary report or including details about any entries that couldn’t be processed automatically.
Troubleshooting: Lessons from the Field
Building this automation taught me valuable lessons about what can go wrong and how to prevent it.
Selector stability presents the biggest ongoing challenge. Web applications frequently update their interfaces, which can break selectors that worked perfectly yesterday. Combat this by using UiPath’s UI Explorer tool to create resilient selectors based on multiple attributes rather than single identifiers. Test your selectors against different scenarios and build in fallback options when possible.
Timing issues plague many automation attempts. Web pages don’t always load at the same speed, and network latency varies. Always configure your activities with WaitForReady set to Complete, which ensures the entire page has finished loading before the bot interacts with it. Use Element Exists activities to verify that interface elements have appeared before attempting to click or type into them. When needed, add explicit delays to account for particularly slow operations.
File locking problems occur when Excel files remain open in the background. Before running your automation, ensure the Jira export file is closed. Consider adding error handling that checks file availability and waits or notifies you if the file is locked.
Data formatting inconsistencies can derail automation. Standardize your Jira export template so columns appear in the same order every time. Validate that required fields contain data before attempting to process them. Add data transformation steps that handle common formatting variations, such as different date formats or decimal separators.
Email configuration often causes initial setup frustration. Ensure your Outlook profile is properly configured in Windows before testing email activities. If using SMTP, verify all server settings, ports, and authentication credentials. Test email sending separately before integrating it into your full workflow.
Your Next Steps: From Reading to Building
Building this timesheet automation fundamentally changed my relationship with repetitive work. What once consumed hours every month now happens automatically while I focus on activities that leverage my expertise and create genuine value. The initial investment of one afternoon has paid dividends week after week.
The beauty of RPA lies in its accessibility. You don’t need a computer science degree or years of programming experience. If you can describe a process step by step, you can automate it with UiPath. The platform handles the technical complexity while you focus on the logic and workflow design.
Start your automation journey today with these resources. UiPath Academy offers comprehensive free training that takes you from complete beginner to certified automation developer. The UiPath Documentation provides detailed technical references and best practices for every activity and feature. The Community Forum connects you with thousands of automation practitioners who share solutions, answer questions, and showcase innovative approaches.
- UiPath Academy – Free Comprehensive Training
- UiPath Documentation – Technical References
- UiPath Community Forum – Expert Support
Look around your daily work and identify processes that fit the automation sweet spot. Tasks that are repetitive and rule-based, performed regularly on a schedule, follow predictable steps every time, involve multiple systems or applications, and consume time that could be better spent elsewhere are all excellent candidates for RPA.
At N47, we specialize in helping organizations identify automation opportunities and implement RPA solutions that deliver measurable business value. We’ve guided teams across industries through their automation journey, from initial process assessment through enterprise-scale deployment. Whether you’re exploring your first bot or scaling an automation program, we bring technical expertise and strategic insight to ensure your success.
Ready to reclaim your time? Don’t let repetitive tasks define your workday. Let your first robot handle the mundane while you focus on the extraordinary. The automation revolution isn’t coming—it’s here, and it’s more accessible than ever.
Your digital workforce awaits. Start building today.
