How to automate reporting with Teamwork and Unito using the Google Sheets Add-On

Reporting is one of the few tasks that touch every role and team in a business. Every single one of us owns, contributes to, or consumes reports—from project progress reports to budgets and everything in between.

Because reporting is so ubiquitous, it tends to eat up a ton of resources. A recent Unito survey found that more than a third (37%) of workers spend at least three hours a week on reporting. That adds up quickly.

At the same time, there’s no denying the impact of reporting. An impressive 75% of respondents in that same survey said their reports provided actionable insights most of the time or every time.

So the big question is: How can you extract the immense value from reporting without investing so much time and effort into it each week?

The answer, of course, lies in automation—with some help from Teamwork and Unito.

Native reporting within Teamwork

There is a range of different reporting options you can automatically generate from your Teamwork projects. On top of these features, we have our newly released Profitability and Project Health reports. 

Let’s jump into how each one of these works, starting with our new Profitability Report:

Teamwork Profitability Report

Within Teamwork, you can report on the profitability of your projects and people. This new report is available on our Scale plan.

The new Profitability Report is perfect for those wanting a real-time, at-glance view of the profitability of each project. Additionally, you can see profitability by individual users contributing to those projects.

Calculations are based on the cost and billable rates of users, and their logged billable or non-billable time.

Whether you want to change billable hours or update the project in general, the Profitability Report allows you to take action much faster. The report also provides your leadership or management teams with detailed insights into project performance.

Teamwork Project Health Report

The Project Health Report gives you clear visibility of the performance and health across multiple projects in a single view. 

For example, if you’re a project manager or senior stakeholder, you can quickly get an understanding of the projects that look set to be delivered on time versus the jobs that will be at risk if action is not quickly taken.

In one quick cohesive snapshot, the relevant user gets an overview of the health of all of their projects. The interactive table view format with customizable columns and column sorting lets you hide irrelevant information. It also highlights the key information critical for your project completion.

The Project Health Report is ideal for users and their teams to adopt project management best practices if and when needed. Within this view, you quickly ensure key information – like project owner, project dates, and project budgets – are all updated. This increases both the discoverability and adoption of these elements. 

Cross-functional and cross-tool reporting with Unito

While many valuable reports can be created in minutes within Teamwork, you may find yourself in a situation that needs more firepower. Maybe your report’s target audience – whether it's executives, partners, clients, or other stakeholders – doesn't work in Teamwork day-to-day.

Or you’re possibly working on a cross-functional project that involves specialized tools like a CRM or development tool, and you need to consolidate this data into a single report. In those situations, many will simply jump from tool to tool, copying and pasting information.

But this only adds a lot of unnecessary time to your overall reporting workflow efforts. This is especially true if you need to do this for multiple reports each week.

Instead, Unito’s two-way integrations for Teamwork empower you to automate your reporting across tools – all without having to leave your preferred app. With the Unito integration, a single workflow can pull in work data from multiple tools into a single report in real-time.

Once your flow is built, you never need to manually update a report again. This will save you and your team precious hours of tedious work each week. 

How Unito is used for reporting

Some of the most common ways the Unito integration is used for reporting include:

• Project progress reporting: Sync data from all tools used in a cross-functional project into a dashboarding tool like Google Sheets to track progress. This report can filter in all tasks or specific tasks based on your need. Use it to identify the status of key initiatives, whether deadlines are being hit, and more.  

• Sales reporting: Seats in Salesforce or HubSpot can get expensive, and not everyone knows how to navigate those tools. Instead, build an automated sales database in a tool like Airtable or Notion. Unito will filter new leads and deals from your CRM and sales-related tasks from Teamwork into a table that anyone can easily understand.  

• Client reports: Don’t want to give clients access to your Teamwork platform, but you're tired of manually building reports? Automate the creation of a client report in their tool of choice. Filter customer-relevant tasks into that report with Unito, and it will update in real-time as tasks progress, so the client is always in the loop.

How to build an automated report with Unito

Imagine you wanted to build a report to track the progress of a new website project. This is a cross-functional project involving the marketing team, which lives and works in Teamwork, and the development team, which uses both GitHub and Jira.

Since jumping into all of those tools isn’t an option, you decide to build your automated report in Google Sheets—a tool everyone is comfortable with. 

Here’s how to do it:

1. Install the Unito add-on

To use Unito’s Google Sheets integration, you first need to install the Unito add-on to your Google Workspace. You can find it by clicking Get add-on within any Google Sheet, and then simply search for "Unito for Google Sheets."

2. Build your Google Sheets progress report

Next, you’ll need to build out your actual report. 

In this case, the information that matters to your progress report is the task title, description, due date, and status. Those four fields need to be in the first row of your Sheet.

Unito reads that first row as a “header” and will sync data into columns based on the fields present in that row. Once that’s done, click on your Unito add-on and select “Insert the two columns in this sheet.”

This causes Unito to add a column named UnitoID at the beginning of your first row and one named Last Modified at the end of it. These columns allow Unito to sync information into Google Sheets. They will fill automatically and can be hidden so they don’t clutter up your report. 

3. Build your Unito flow

Now for the fun part. 

Go to the Unito website and start a two-week free trial. Then start building your first flow. Begin by picking the project report on one side and your Teamwork marketing project on the other. 

Next, set the flow direction so information is flowing from Teamwork into Google Sheets. Your flow could also be two-way if you want any information edited in the Google Sheet to be reflected back in Teamwork.

From there, you can customize the flow as needed. With Unito, you can build simple rules to filter only specific information from Teamwork to Google Sheets. You can also map specific fields across tools to ensure that information always lands exactly where you want.

Once everything is to your liking, launch your flow and watch your Teamwork tasks appear in your Google Sheets report. 

Then create two more flows: one for Jira and another for GitHub.

When all is said and done, tasks in all three tools will populate your Google Sheets report. As the project progresses, any changes will be reflected in the report in real-time, so you never need to manually update it. 

Ready to automate the worst part of your week?

Very few people actually like reporting. For many, it’s the worst part of their job. But we invest hours into it because we know how valuable it can be. 

Teamwork and Unito not only eliminate the painful process of gathering data and building reports, together they actually help increase the value they bring to the organization. With cross-tool data being shared and updated in real-time, you can increase the visibility of important work and empower teams to move faster by eliminating risks and jumping on opportunities.

Want to reclaim precious hours each week by automating your reporting? 

Try Unito for two weeks free.