Overview
Timesheet data is the input to almost every downstream workflow that touches "how much time did we spend on what" — payroll, billing, project profitability, compliance audits, capacity planning. Mobaro provides three paths for getting that data out: filtering and exporting from the Timesheets list view in the Mobaro Backend, pulling data through the Mobaro API, or scheduling automatic exports via the Power Automate connector. This article covers each path and when to use which.
Why this matters: Timesheet data sitting only in Mobaro doesn't help your finance, operations, or compliance teams. The right export pattern — manual ad-hoc, scheduled API, or Power Automate flow — keeps downstream systems in sync without becoming a weekly chore for someone in CS or Ops.
Required access: To view all Timesheet entries (not just your own) and export them, you must be a Super User or hold a Role with the Timesheets: Administrate permission. For API-based exports, you also need a valid Mobaro API key.
The Timesheets list view
The centralized Timesheets page in the Mobaro Backend is the starting point for any ad-hoc reporting or export. From there you can filter, sort, and act on the resulting set.
Common filters that scale:
Date range — the first filter to apply on almost any reporting question. Pay periods, weeks, sprints, fiscal months.
User — for individual time review or per-person totals.
Approval state — to focus on Awaiting Approval (review queue) or Approved (clean reporting data).
Entry Type — to slice by category (Work, Travel, Training, etc., depending on the Types you've configured).
Best practice: For recurring exports (payroll runs, monthly billing), apply the same filter combination every cycle. Save the filter mental model in a runbook so a different person can reproduce the export when the usual owner is out.
Exporting via the API
For programmatic, repeatable, or large-scale exports, the Mobaro API is the right tool. The endpoint:
GET /api/customers/timesheets
Standard Mobaro auth (the X-Api-Key header) and standard pagination/filtering apply. A typical pay-period export — pulling all entries between two dates — looks like:
curl "https://app.mobaro.com/api/customers/timesheets?CreatedAfter=2025-01-01T00:00:00Z&CreatedBefore=2025-01-15T00:00:00Z" \
--header "X-Api-Key: YOUR_SECRET_TOKEN"
Note: The exact filter parameters and response schema are documented in the API reference. See Getting started with the Mobaro API for auth and the basics, and Mobaro API parameter reference for available filters.
Common API export use cases
Pay-period payroll feed — daily or weekly job that pulls all Approved entries within the period and writes them to a payroll system or finance data warehouse.
Billing/invoicing data — per-Project or per-Assignment time totals, joined to billing rates downstream.
Compliance audit snapshots — periodic full exports stored alongside other compliance evidence for inspections.
Operational dashboards — feeding Power BI, Tableau, Google Sheets, or similar with current Timesheet data for live management views.
Scheduled exports via Power Automate
If you want automated exports without writing scripts, the Mobaro Power Automate connector is a low/no-code option. Typical pattern: a daily flow that pulls Timesheet entries and lands them in Excel, SharePoint, or a finance system.
Connect Mobaro and your destination system in Power Automate.
Build a flow that runs on your desired cadence (daily, weekly, on a specific day of the month).
Configure the flow to pull Timesheet entries with appropriate date filters.
Map the response fields to the destination columns and save.
Best practice: For payroll-critical exports, build the flow to deliver the file before your payroll cutoff and have the same flow notify a finance team channel when it succeeds. If the flow fails, you'll know in time to run a manual export rather than discovering the gap during payroll close.
For setup specifics, see Getting started with Mobaro's Power Automate connector and How to schedule daily exports from Mobaro using Power Automate.
Common reporting patterns
Payroll cycles
For most organizations, the highest-stakes Timesheet export is the payroll feed. The pattern that scales:
Lock in the cycle definition (e.g., "Monday to Sunday, exported every Monday morning").
Filter to Approved entries only — Awaiting Approval entries shouldn't go to payroll.
Run the export early enough that any missing approvals can be chased before cutoff.
Billing and invoicing
For client-billable work, group by Assignment, Project, or whichever organizational unit your contracts use. Time entries paired with billing rates downstream produce the invoice line items. Filter on Approved entries for billable accuracy.
Compliance and audit
For regulated environments where auditors may ask "show me all the time logged on equipment X in Q3," a periodic full export of all Timesheet entries — Approved and Awaiting both — preserved alongside other compliance evidence is the safest pattern. Don't rely on the live Mobaro instance as your only audit record.
Operational dashboards
For live "where is the team's time going" views, an automated API or Power Automate flow that refreshes every few hours into a BI tool (Power BI, Tableau, Google Sheets) gives leadership a current picture without anyone having to run a manual export.
Best practices
Always filter before exporting
An unfiltered export of every Timesheet ever is rarely the right move. Apply your date range and other filters first; the resulting export is smaller, faster, and easier to reason about downstream.
Filter on Approved for clean reporting
For any report that becomes a financial or operational record (payroll, invoicing, KPIs), filter to Approved entries only. Awaiting Approval entries are not yet authoritative and can change.
Document recurring exports as a runbook
For exports that happen on a cycle (weekly payroll, monthly billing), write down the exact filter combination, destination, and timing. This makes the process reproducible by anyone on the team and protects against single-point-of-failure ownership.
Best practice: Match the export cadence to the downstream consumption cadence. Weekly payroll → weekly export. Daily ops dashboard → daily refresh. Quarterly compliance review → quarterly snapshot. Over-frequent exports waste API calls and create version churn; under-frequent ones leave downstream consumers with stale data.
Anti-patterns to avoid
Watch out for these habits, which create downstream pain:
Exporting before all approvals are in — for payroll-grade exports, late-arriving approvals cause reconciliation work. Set a clear approval cutoff before each export.
Mixing Approved and Awaiting in the same export — downstream consumers can't tell which entries are authoritative. Filter on state explicitly.
Manual exports as the only path — anything that runs on a regular cadence should be automated. Manual exports are missed when the owner is out, and humans pick the wrong filters under time pressure.
Large unfiltered API pulls — risks rate limiting and timeouts. Always paginate and use date filters.
Exporting without versioning — keep dated copies of payroll and audit exports. If a downstream system has a bug, the historical export is your fallback.
See also
Approving and rejecting Timesheet entries — for the approval state transitions that exports filter on.
Editing or deleting submitted Timesheet entries — for what happens when entries change after an export.
Create a Timesheet Entry — the source of every record in the export.
Getting started with the Mobaro API — auth, headers, and your first request.
Mobaro API parameter reference — pagination, filtering, and date filters.
Getting started with Mobaro's Power Automate connector — for low/no-code automation.
How to schedule daily exports from Mobaro using Power Automate — for the canonical daily export pattern.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Should I include Awaiting Approval entries in a payroll export?
A: No. Filter to Approved only for any export feeding payroll, billing, or financial reporting. Awaiting entries are not authoritative and can be edited or deleted before they're approved.
Q: What happens if an entry gets edited after I've exported it?
A: The export is a snapshot at the moment you ran it. Subsequent edits don't update the exported file. For workflows where the downstream system needs to track changes, run regular re-exports or build a sync that updates rows by entry ID.
Q: Can I get only entries that were edited or approved since the last export?
A: Yes — use date filters like UpdatedAfter or equivalents to pull only entries modified since your last sync timestamp. This is the foundation of incremental sync workflows.
Q: How do I include the Assignment, Location, or User context in the export?
A: The Timesheet entry response includes IDs for related entities (User, Assignment). For human-readable exports, your script or Power Automate flow joins those IDs against the corresponding endpoints (/users, /locations, etc.) to resolve names. Some BI tools handle this join automatically once both data sets are loaded.
Q: What's the maximum size of a single API export?
A: Mobaro paginates results and rate-limits requests under high load. For very large exports, paginate using Limit and Offset, batch by date range (e.g., one month at a time), and handle 429/503 responses with backoff and retry. See Getting started with the Mobaro API.
Q: Is there an audit log of who exported what, when?
A: Mobaro doesn't currently surface a centralized export audit log. For compliance-sensitive environments, log exports yourself — record the timestamp, the filters used, and the file destination as part of the export job.