Extract timesheet from iCal

Consulting and project work often live in the calendar first: blocks for clients, meetings, and focus time. Turning that into a timesheet or a billing summary usually means retyping or awkward copy-paste from Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar into a spreadsheet. Exporting iCalendar (.ics) is built into most of those products; the missing piece is a lightweight way to reshape that export into tabular data you can sum and attach to an invoice.

CalTS (Calendar TimeSheet) is a small tool I built for that workflow: parse an .ics file in the browser, inspect and filter events, then copy the visible rows to the clipboard for Excel, LibreOffice, or whatever you use downstream.

Why client-side only

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The calendar file often contains meeting titles, attendee hints, and locations—data you may not want on a random SaaS backend. CalTS runs entirely in the browser: you choose a file, parsing happens with JavaScript, and nothing is sent to a server. The trade-off is obvious: you need a modern browser and you are limited by local memory if someone hands you a multi-year, high-volume export. For typical monthly or quarterly slices, that has never been a problem in practice.

What it does

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• Parse standard .ics files using ical.js (Mozilla’s parser, battle-tested on real-world feeds).
• Filter by a start and end date before you even think about exporting.
• Search across the loaded events so you can narrow by client code in the title, project name, or any text field you keep in summaries.
• Show durations so you can sanity-check blocks against what you remember billing.
• Export the currently visible (filtered) rows to the clipboard as tab-separated values—paste once into a sheet and you are done.

The UI is built with Vue 3 (Composition API), TypeScript, Vite, and Vuetify 3 for a dense data table without reinventing grids and date pickers. That stack was chosen for fast iteration and predictable typing around parsed event objects, not for novelty.

Typical workflow

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1. Export your calendar (or the relevant sub-calendar) to an .ics file from your provider’s UI.
2. Open the live app, choose the file, set the date range, and click Parse.
3. Refine with the search box until the table matches what you want on the timesheet.
4. Copy visible events to clipboard and paste into your spreadsheet; add rates or project columns there if your process needs them.

If your organization blocks clipboard APIs in locked-down browsers, try a normal desktop profile—the app does not require installation.

Limits and expectations

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iCalendar is a flexible format; recurring events, time zones, and all-day entries behave differently across calendar apps. CalTS is a practical extractor, not a full calendaring engine: after a big import, spot-check a few rows (especially around daylight-saving boundaries and all-day vs timed events) before you treat the sheet as authoritative for billing.

Source and demo

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• GitLab repository — build instructions, npm run dev / npm run build, ESLint setup.
• Live webapp — static hosting on GitLab Pages.