Export timesheets
If your team tracks effort in any timesheet or time-tracking system like ClarityPPM, Oracle Time and Labor, Smartsheets, AdobeWorkfront, Deltek, or other system, you can easily export that time data to Neo.Tax to calculate your R&D allocations.
Export your data to a spreadsheet (CSV or Excel), format it using the guidance below, and upload it to Neo.Tax.
We recommend exporting all columns your system has for the tax year. That gives our system the most information to work with.
File Structure
Each row should represents one person’s effort on one project or non-project time) for a given date.
Put all rows in a single sheet with a header row.
For date, the system can handle days or weeks. But the file should use the same unit.
Minimum Required Columns
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Project Name | Name of the project or time category the effort went to. |
| Employee Name | The person’s name as it appears in your system. |
| Employee ID | Your organization’s ID for that person (their payroll/HR ID). This is the main value we match on, so it should be the same ID that appears in your payroll data |
| Date | The date the effort applies to. |
| Effort Amount | How much effort the person logged, as a plain number (see Formatting rules below). |
Strongly Recommended: include every project column you have
These columns are optional, but we recommend including all of them that your system has.
The more you include, the better and more accurate your R&D projects will be.
| Column | What it is / why it helps |
|---|---|
| Project ID | Your system’s short code or ID for the project. Especially helpful because it stays stable even if a project is later renamed. |
| Category | Any category label on the row. Helps us identify and correctly exclude non-R&D time. |
| Work /Activity Type | The type of work logged on the row. Another signal we use to qualify time. |
| Project Description | A description of the project. We use this to describe the generated R&D project. |
Formatting rules
One unit per file — hours OR percentages, never both. Every Effort Amount in the file must be in the same unit. Don’t mix hours and percentages in one file; if some rows are hours and others are percentages, the numbers will be combined incorrectly. You’ll tell us which unit the file uses when it’s uploaded.
- Effort Amount must be a plain number. Just the number — e.g.
8.5or0.25. No text and no units in the cell (not8.5 hrs, not25%). - Use a consistent date format for Date across the whole file (e.g.
2025-03-14). - Keep it to one sheet of data with a single header row.
- File type: CSV or Excel (
.xlsx).
Sending your file to Neo.Tax
Upload in Data Sources > Timesheets, or share the file with your Neo.Tax contact
FAQ
Do I have to include the optional columns?
No — only the four required columns must appear in every row. But include as many of the optional columns as you have, especially the project columns, for the best-quality results.
My data has some rows in hours and some in percentages.
Pick one unit and convert so the entire file is consistent. A single file can’t mix hours and percentages.
What is “Employee ID”?
It’s your organization’s own ID for the person — typically their payroll or HR ID, the same ID found in your payroll data. It is not a Neo.Tax ID. We match on it, so accuracy here matters.
Some rows aren’t tied to a project.
That’s fine — leave Project Name (and the other project columns) blank for those rows.
I use both timesheets and ticketing — what happens?
For anyone who has timesheet data, their timesheet drives their R&D allocation. People who aren’t in the timesheet keep using their ticketing data as usual.