Why Kimai's Built-in Reports Fall Short — And What to Do About It
Kimai is one of the best open-source time tracking tools available. It's free, self-hosted, multi-user, and handles everything from invoicing to budget tracking. For freelancers and small agencies, it's hard to beat.
But spend enough time with it and one frustration surfaces consistently: the reporting.
When users are asked what they'd improve, the feedback is remarkably consistent. One Capterra reviewer put it plainly: "No visual reports — it is better to export to Excel and then analyse there." That's a telling sign. When your users are copying data into spreadsheets to answer basic questions, the tool is leaving value on the table.
This post looks at exactly where Kimai's built-in reporting falls short, and what you can do about it.
What Kimai's Built-in Reports Do Well
To be fair, Kimai ships with a solid set of standard reports:
- **My times** — your own timesheet entries
- **All times** — admin view across all users
- **Weekly hours** — a spreadsheet-style week view
- **Per user / per customer / per project** — pre-built breakdowns
For a solo freelancer logging hours and generating invoices, this is perfectly adequate. But the moment you're running a team, billing multiple clients, or trying to answer a cross-cutting question — things get complicated fast.
Where It Gets Frustrating
1. You can't filter across multiple customers or projects at once
Kimai's built-in reports work one entity at a time. Want to see all hours logged across three specific clients this month? You're looking at three separate report views, then manually combining the numbers. There's no multi-select filter.
2. There's no way to see customer → project → user in one view
The built-in reports slice the data one dimension at a time. You can see hours by project, or hours by user — but not hours grouped by customer, broken down by project, then by user, all in a single table. That's the view most agency owners and project managers actually need.
3. Budget tracking isn't visible alongside time data
Kimai does track time and money budgets per project — but this data doesn't appear in the reporting view in any meaningful way. You have to navigate to the project settings to check budget status, separately from where you're looking at hours.
4. You can't save a report configuration
Every time you want to run the same report — same date range, same customers, same columns — you have to set it up from scratch. There's no way to save "Monthly client overview" and reload it next month with one click.
5. PDF export is basic
Kimai can export timesheets, but the output is a raw data dump rather than a client-ready document. Formatting a Kimai export into something you'd send to a client still requires work in Word or Excel.
Who Feels This Most
These limitations are mostly invisible if you're a solo user tracking your own hours. But if any of these describe you, you've probably already hit the ceiling:
**Small agencies** billing multiple clients simultaneously, needing a cross-client view of hours logged and budget consumed each month.
**IT teams** running internal projects across departments, needing to report upward on where time is going without manually compiling data.
**Freelancers with multiple active clients** who want a quick weekly summary across all work without toggling between individual project views.
The Fix: Custom Reports Bundle
We built the Custom Reports Bundle specifically to address these gaps — as a native Kimai plugin that integrates directly into your existing installation.
Here's what it adds:
- Multi-entity filtering — filter by multiple customers, projects, and users simultaneously in a single report run.
- Hierarchical table view — Customer → Project → User in one table, with expandable rows to drill down into individual timesheet entries.
- Budget progress bars — time and money budget usage visible at the project level, colour-coded by how much has been consumed.
- Column visibility — show only the columns you need: hours, billable hours, revenue, costs, profit, date, description, activity.
- Saved report presets — save any filter configuration as a named report, share it with your team, and reload it in one click.
- CSV and PDF export — export the exact view you've configured, not a raw data dump.
- Date range presets — This Week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month — no manual date entry for recurring reports.
The plugin installs in under two minutes and requires no database migrations.
It appears in Kimai's Reporting menu and uses the same permission system you already have configured.
Pricing
The Custom Reports Bundle is $99/year per Kimai installation — unlimited users. All future updates are included.
At that price, it pays for itself the first time it saves your team from manually compiling a client report in Excel.
One Last Thought
Kimai is excellent software and its built-in reporting is genuinely useful for straightforward use cases. The gaps described here aren't criticisms of the project — they're natural limitations of a general-purpose tool that does a lot of things well.
The Custom Reports Bundle is just the reporting layer that agencies and teams tend to need on top. If you're already running Kimai and finding yourself reaching for Excel to answer basic questions, it might be exactly what you're looking for.
© All rights reserved.