The way to approve timesheets faster is to move the work upstream of approval day. Set a submission deadline with a buffer before payroll, automate the reminders so timesheets arrive on time, review by exception instead of line by line, and reject with a specific reason so each error gets fixed once.

That is the whole method, and this article walks through how to approve timesheets faster in six steps. You need nothing to start except your payroll calendar and whatever timesheet tool you already use, and setting it up takes about an hour.

1. Set a submission deadline that isn’t the approval deadline
2. Automate reminders so you’re not the one chasing people
3. Review by exception, not line by line
4. Learn the short list of red flags worth your attention
5. Reject with a reason, or the same error comes back
6. Audit your own approval cycle once a quarter

Why reviewing faster won’t help you approve timesheets faster

Approval day takes all afternoon for three reasons, and reading speed is none of them.

First, timesheets arrive late. If half the team submits an hour before payroll closes, every correction becomes an emergency and there is no time to send anything back.

Second, every line gets equal scrutiny. Most timesheets in a normal week are clean, yet many managers inspect them entry by entry anyway, spending the bulk of the afternoon confirming things that were fine.

Third, rejected timesheets bounce back with the same errors, because the rejection said “please fix” without saying what or how. Each of these is a process design problem. The steps that follow fix them one at a time.

Step 1: Set a submission deadline that isn’t the approval deadline

Put at least one full working day between when employees must submit and when you must approve — and put your approval deadline before the payroll cutoff, not on it. Three dates, in sequence, with buffer between each.

Say your payroll runs Friday at 5 p.m. A workable schedule looks like this:

• Tuesday, end of day — employee submission deadline
• Wednesday — your review day; anything rejected goes back with time to fix it
• Thursday, noon — your approval deadline; corrected timesheets are re-approved by now
• Friday, 5 p.m. — payroll cutoff, with a half-day of slack left for genuine emergencies

Copy that structure onto your own pay period, whatever its length. The principle holds: a rejection only works if the person has working hours left to act on it before payroll closes. If your payroll hours come straight from approved timesheets, this buffer is what stands between you and running payroll on unverified numbers.

The mistake to avoid: setting the submission deadline and the approval deadline to the same day. That turns every late timesheet and every needed correction into a same-day scramble, which is exactly the afternoon you are trying to eliminate.

Step 2: Automate reminders so you’re not the one chasing people

Set up three automated touchpoints and stop sending chase messages yourself:

1. One reminder the day before the submission deadline — catches the majority who simply hadn’t gotten to it yet.
2. One at the deadline — for anyone who missed the first.
3. Escalation only for the remaining few — a direct message or a note to their lead, reserved for people still missing after both reminders.

Managers often resist this step because they don’t want to feel like the office nag. Automation solves that directly: a system reminder is impersonal, arrives at the same time for everyone, and carries no edge. Consistency matters more than intensity — one predictable reminder every cycle outperforms an annoyed message sent whenever you happen to remember.

WebWork sends timesheet reminders on the schedule you set and routes submitted timesheets through a timesheet approval workflow, so submissions land in one queue instead of your inbox. Most timesheet tools offer some version of this; whichever one you use, the point is that the chasing happens without you.

The mistake to avoid: sending reminders manually “just this once.” Manual chasing doesn’t scale past a handful of people, and the cycles where you’re busiest are exactly the cycles you’ll forget.

Step 3: Review by exception, not line by line

Exception-based review means you compare each timesheet against that person’s normal pattern and only inspect the entries that break it. A timesheet that matches the usual hours, the usual projects, and the usual distribution gets approved in seconds. An entry that deviates gets a closer look.

Here is the pattern we see across teams that use approval workflows: line-by-line review of a clean timesheet catches almost nothing, because the errors worth catching are almost never hidden inside an otherwise normal week. They show up as anomalies — a spike, a gap, a project that person never works on. Reading every line of every timesheet spends most of your attention on entries that were never going to be wrong.

In practice, exception-based review works like this:

• Open the timesheet and check the weekly total against that person’s typical total.
• Scan the project breakdown for anything unfamiliar.
• If both look normal, approve and move on. Do not re-read individual days.
• If something deviates, inspect only the deviating entries — not the whole sheet.

Rubber-stamping means approving without looking; exception-based review looks at the deviations and deliberately skips re-verifying what the person’s own history already verifies. It is the single biggest time saver in the entire timesheet approval process, and it gets more accurate the longer you do it, because you learn each person’s baseline.

The mistake to avoid: applying exception-based review before you know someone’s baseline. For a new hire’s first few cycles, review in full — you’re building the pattern you’ll later check against.

Step 4: Know the short list of red flags actually worth your attention

Exception-based review only works if you know what an exception looks like. These six flags cover nearly everything worth stopping for:

• An overtime spike relative to that person’s normal week. The comparison is to their own baseline, not a fixed threshold. A sudden jump usually means a genuine crunch, a forgotten timer left running, or hours logged to the wrong week — all three need a question before approval.
• Missing or wrong project codes. Hours without a project can’t be billed, costed, or reported correctly. If your billing depends on project-level time tracking, a miscoded entry is an invoicing error waiting to happen.
• Duplicate entries. The same task and time block appearing twice usually means a manual entry was added on top of a tracked one. It inflates the week and, on billable work, double-charges the client.
• Zero-hour days that weren’t leave. Either the person forgot to track, worked without logging, or a day off never made it into the leave system. Each cause needs a different fix, so ask rather than assume.
• Round-number weeks. Exactly eight hours every day, every week, on varied work usually signals estimated entries typed in at the end of the week rather than tracked time. Estimates aren’t fraud, but they’re not what your reporting assumes it’s getting.
• Hours logged to a closed or completed project. Usually a default-project setting nobody updated. Harmless once, costly if it runs for a month before anyone notices.

Bookmark this list and run it as your scan on review day. Anything that trips a flag gets inspected; anything that doesn’t gets approved.

The mistake to avoid: treating every flag as an accusation. Most flags turn out to be honest mistakes or configuration issues. Ask first.

Step 5: Reject with a reason, or the same error comes back

A useful rejection names three things: the specific entry, what’s wrong with it, and what correct looks like. For example: “Tuesday’s 6 hours are logged to Project A, which closed last month — please move them to Project B and resubmit.” The person can fix that in under a minute, and they now know the rule for next time.

Compare that with “please fix and resubmit.” The person doesn’t know which entry you mean, guesses, resubmits, and you’re reviewing the same timesheet a second time — sometimes with the original error still in it. Vague rejections guarantee a second round; specific ones end the loop in one.

Track repeat offenders separately. If the same person makes the same error three cycles running, another rejection won’t change anything — that’s a ten-minute conversation about how their tracking is set up, or a sign their default project, task list, or tracker configuration needs fixing. Timesheet approval best practices treat repeated identical errors as a setup problem, not a diligence problem.

The mistake to avoid: silently correcting entries yourself to save time. It feels faster in the moment, but the person never learns the error existed, so you inherit the same correction every cycle indefinitely.

Step 6: Audit your own approval cycle once a quarter

Once a quarter, spend twenty minutes on three questions:

• How many timesheets came in after the submission deadline?
• How many needed a rejection, and for what reasons?
• Are the same error types recurring across different people?

Each answer points to a specific adjustment. Persistent late submissions mean the deadline or the reminder timing is wrong for how your team actually works — move one of them.

A high rejection rate concentrated in one error type across multiple people means the timesheet setup is the problem: unclear project codes, a confusing task structure, or a tracker default nobody changed. Fix the setup once instead of rejecting the symptom every cycle.

The mistake to avoid: skipping the audit because approval day feels fine now. Processes drift — new hires, new projects, and new pay schedules quietly reintroduce the old bottlenecks unless someone checks.

How to know the new process is working

You’ll know after one full cycle. The signs: most timesheets arrive before the deadline without you sending a single message, clean timesheets take seconds each to approve, and rejected timesheets come back corrected on the first resubmission. Your approval day should shrink from an afternoon to a fraction of it — measure it yourself against your last cycle.

If it didn’t work, diagnose by step. Timesheets still late means your reminders fire too close to the deadline or the escalation has no teeth — move the first reminder earlier.

Review still slow means you’re re-reading clean timesheets — recheck yourself against the red-flag list and approve anything that trips nothing. Corrections still bouncing means your rejections are missing one of the three parts: the entry, the problem, the fix.

If you want to see how this works in practice — automated reminders, an approval queue, and rejection notes in one place — you can try WebWork free for 14 days.

The single most important thing to get right is the buffer in Step 1. Every other step depends on it: reminders need a deadline to point at, exception review needs time to ask questions, and rejections are worthless if there are no working hours left to act on them. So this week, before you touch anything else, open your payroll calendar and set a submission deadline at least one full working day before your approval deadline — then tell the team once, and let the reminders do the rest.