What Is a Timesheet?

What is a timesheet?

A timesheet is a document where work hours are recorded, along with other important related data. They take the form of information tables, which is where a part of the name comes from. Timesheets can also be in digital or paper form, though online timesheets are more common because of the convenience they offer.

Contents of a timesheet

Besides just total hours worked, timesheets contain lots of other information related to your staff’s workflows. These data points include:

In addition to these, you may also need to add other details to your timesheets depending on what you’ll be using them for. For example, if you use timesheets for billing, you may need to include your client’s details as well.

Timesheet or time sheet?

Both are correct. Timesheet is the more common spelling in modern business writing and the form payroll and HR software almost always uses. Time sheet is the older two-word version and still turns up in legal texts, government forms and older policy documents. The plural follows the same rule — timesheets or time sheets. Whichever you pick, use it consistently across your payroll and HR documents so records stay easy to search.

Are timesheets required by law?

If you pay your team a fixed salary, you likely won’t need to deal with timesheets. But, if you pay your staff on an hourly basis, then you need to comply with timekeeping laws. For example, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has a set of recordkeeping requirements that you’ll need to follow if you’re based in the US. What those rules actually require — how long records must be kept, what has to be on them, who signs off — is covered in our guide to timesheet compliance and legal requirements. For accurate information on what timekeeping requirements apply to your business, consult with a local labor lawyer.

The Purpose of Timesheets

Let’s now explore how timesheets can help you with various aspects of your business. These include:

• Payroll
• Project management
• Client billing

Payroll management

Managing payroll accurately is vital if you pay your staff on an hourly basis. Doing this without timesheets is very difficult. This way you won’t have records of how much your employees worked at any given point in time. Ensuring your time data, and thus payroll calculations, are accurate can have several benefits. We’ll explore these more in-depth when we cover what a timesheet app is a bit later in this guide.

Project management

Timesheets can come in handy when managing projects in your business. Through them, you can get a detailed overview of how much time and money your organization spends on each of your projects. This will help you ensure that the right projects are prioritized. Besides this, timesheets will help you detect an unbalanced workload distribution across your team. This is the first step in fighting against work overload in your business, the downsides of which are plentiful and obvious.

Billing clients

If your team works on projects for specific clients, then timesheets are essentially non-negotiable for your firm. You’ll often need them for not only billing upon the delivery of a project but also as proof of work in the middle of one. Timesheets will help you foster a sense of trust with your clients, making them an invaluable investment.

Different Types of Timesheets

Let’s now shift our focus to a different aspect of our topic: what are the types of timesheets?

Manual vs automatic time sheets

The two main types of timesheets are manual and automatic. These are pretty self-explanatory: your staff fill out manual timesheets themselves, while automated ones are done with software. Automated timesheets are typically generated by time-tracking apps like WebWork. If you use WebWork’s Desktop Time Tracker, you’ll get info on what apps and websites your staff spent their time on. This will allow you to verify the accuracy of your timesheets to bill clients and pay employees correctly.

Timesheet timeframes

Besides being manual and automated, timesheets can also differ by their timeframes. The most common one is the weekly timesheet. As the name suggests, this covers a week of a given employee’s work hours. However, you can also use bi-weekly or monthly timesheets depending on how frequently you pay your team.

Need one to fill in? Download a ready-made free timesheet template for any of these periods — eight of them, in Excel, Google Sheets or PDF.

How the Timesheet Process Works

A timesheet moves through four stages: the employee records their hours, submits the sheet at the end of the period, a manager reviews and approves it, and the approved hours go to payroll or client invoicing. On paper each stage is a handoff; in time-tracking software they all happen in the same place.

1. Record the hours — The employee logs start and end times, breaks and — where it matters — the project or task each block of time belongs to. On a manual sheet this happens daily; with a time tracker it is recorded automatically in the background.
2. Submit at the end of the period — At the close of the week, fortnight or month, the employee checks the sheet for gaps, fills in what is missing and submits it. This is where most delays start: payroll cannot begin until every sheet is in.
3. Review and approve — A manager checks the hours against schedules, leave and what was actually delivered, then approves the sheet or sends it back for correction. Approval is what turns recorded time into a figure the business will pay on.
4. Pay and invoice — Approved hours go to payroll for wages and overtime and, on client work, into invoices at the agreed rate. That same approved sheet is the record you fall back on in a pay dispute or an audit.

How Timesheet Software Helps

Everything above works on paper or in a spreadsheet. What changes with software is that recording, submitting and approving stop being separate manual steps.

What timesheet software does

Timesheet management software is an app that keeps all of your team’s tracked time in one place. Instead of collecting sheets, you see the same data as a timesheet, as a timeline, or as reports — in WebWork all three views run off the same tracked hours.

Saving money and cutting time theft

An inaccurate timesheet costs money twice: through overpaying for hours that were not worked, and through fines where local record-keeping rules are not met. The larger of the two is usually time theft — hours logged and paid for that were never worked. Automatic tracking removes the opportunity, because the hours are recorded as they happen rather than reconstructed from memory at the end of the week.

What to look for: approvals and automatic tracking

Two features do most of the work. Automatic time tracking keeps the raw hours accurate — in WebWork, Automatic Time Tracking is on by default through the desktop tracker’s “Autorun” option. Timesheet approvals catch what automation cannot: time added by hand, and honest mistakes. WebWork’s Timesheet Approvals let you approve or reject a sheet and set who on your management team may do so, so sign-off does not bottleneck on one person.