A five-minute timesheet approval routine

Approving timesheets is the last point where a mistake in someone's hours is cheap to fix. After that it is in payroll, and putting it right means a correction on the next payslip and an awkward conversation. That is a good reason to approve carefully. It is not a reason to read every line of every week, which is slow and, oddly, worse at catching problems, because the three entries that matter are buried among sixty that don't.

This routine takes about five minutes for a team of ten to fifteen people. It works with any system, including paper. The idea is simple: look at the same few things, in the same order, every week.

Before you start: decide what normal looks like

You can only spot an exception if you know what a normal week is. For shift workers, normal is the published schedule. For people who fill in hours afterwards, normal is their contract hours spread over their usual days. Have one of those open next to the timesheets. A timesheet on its own says Emma worked 8:30 to 17:15 on Tuesday. Next to the schedule, it says she started half an hour early, and now you have something to ask about.

The five checks

Work through these in order. Each one answers a question payroll will otherwise ask you later.

1. Missing time

Start with what is not there. A blank day is the easiest thing to miss when you read line by line, because there is no line to read. Compare the days worked with the days scheduled. A gap has three possible causes, and each needs a different fix: the person was off and should have a time off request, they worked and forgot to record it, or the schedule changed and nobody updated it.

2. Typed-in time

Where people normally clock in, hours typed in afterwards are the exception. They are not suspicious in themselves. Phones run out of battery and people forget. But a typed entry rests on memory instead of a clock, so it deserves a second look. A reason such as “forgot to clock in, started with Ben at 7” is fine. No reason, or the same reason every week, is worth a conversation. If your whole team fills in hours instead of clocking, skip this check: typing is their normal.

3. Long days and breaks

Look for shifts that ran much longer than planned. The usual cause is a missed clock-out, which leaves a shift running until someone or something closes it. If your system clocks people out automatically after a set number of hours, the finish time it recorded is a guess. Confirm the real one with the person before you approve. While you are here, check that long shifts have a break recorded, if breaks are unpaid or required where you work.

4. Overtime

Overtime is the most expensive line on a timesheet, so it gets its own check. The question is not whether the sum is right, which is a job for software, but whether the overtime was expected. Planned overtime to cover a busy week needs no discussion. A quarter of an hour over the limit every day, unplanned, is a pattern to raise before it becomes a habit.

5. Location

If you use a location check, look at clock-ins flagged as outside the area. Treat the flag as a question, not an accusation. Most have an ordinary explanation, and a manager who assumes the worst quickly loses the team's goodwill toward the whole system.

Send back, don't fix silently

When an entry is wrong, it is tempting to correct it yourself. You probably know what the right time was. Resist it. If you change someone's hours without them knowing, the first they hear of it is a payslip that does not match their memory, and you have a dispute with no record of why the figure changed.

Send the week back with a short, specific note instead. The person who worked the hours corrects them and submits again. It costs a day at most, and the record then shows who entered what. Where you do need to edit an entry yourself, for example because someone is away, tell them, and add a reason.

Approve the clean weeks in one go

Once the exceptions are handled, everything else can be approved together. Reading clean weeks line by line adds time without adding safety. In ClockinBee, Approvals does the sorting for you: weeks that fit your rules with nothing flagged are grouped as Ready and can be approved together, and anything unusual is set aside with the reason shown, such as overtime, time added later or a clock-in outside the area.

Pick a day and keep to it

The routine only stays at five minutes if you run it weekly. Leave approvals to the end of a monthly pay period and you are asking people about a Tuesday four weeks ago, with payroll waiting. A fixed slot works best: timesheets submitted by the end of the last working day of the week, approved the next morning. A weekly reminder to submit, sent automatically, removes most of the chasing.

1. 1End of the week: everyone submits. A reminder goes to anyone who has not.
2. 2Next working morning: run the five checks on the exceptions.
3. 3Send back anything unclear with a one-line question.
4. 4Approve the clean weeks together.
5. 5Later that day: approve the weeks that came back corrected.

Common questions