Problem: In Some cases, even before you create the timesheet, you see the “actual hours” pre-filled in your time sheet.

Explanation: This is not actually a direct issue as much, but a indirect issue caused by updating project Plan through My tasks page first and not syncing it through Time sheet. Assuming you are not importing hours from your timesheet, and lets say you mark % work complete on a task that is scheduled to end in future through My Tasks page, without changing the start and Finish dates.

Once your project manager accepts these updates and publishes the task, MS project fills in the actual hours as planned and pre-populates your timesheet as well. At this point it is upto the user to update the Timesheets and sync them back with My Tasks page.

To avoid this confusion, the better approach is to allow resources to update My tasks page using only “Time entry by Timesheet Only” method. More on this in later posts.