Timesheet Approval
Timesheet approval is a workflow in which a manager or project lead reviews and approves employee or contractor time entries before they are used for payroll, billing, or reporting. Approval workflows create an audit trail and a data quality gate between time data and financial outputs.
What timesheet approval does
Timesheet approval serves three purposes:
1. Payroll data quality. Before hours flow to payroll, a manager confirms they’re accurate. This catches missing entries, duplicate entries, or obvious errors (8 hours logged on a day the employee was on leave).
2. Billing accuracy. Before a client invoice is generated, a project manager confirms that logged hours are billable and correctly assigned. This prevents billing for out-of-scope work or unbillable activities.
3. Compliance and audit trail. For industries requiring time record compliance (legal, government contracting, construction), the approval creates a signed-off record of work performed at a specific time. This record is the audit evidence.
How approval workflows work in major tools
Harvest: Submit timesheet → Manager receives notification → Manager reviews and approves or rejects with a comment → Locked from edits after approval. Harvest’s approval is the most commonly referenced in agency contexts.
Hubstaff: Weekly timesheet approval with manager review. Integrates with payroll — approved hours flow directly to payroll calculation.
Clockify: Timesheet approval on paid plans (Standard and above). Manager sees all team members’ timesheets in a consolidated view for the period.
Toggl Track: No built-in approval workflow. Timesheets are visible to managers but there’s no formal approve/reject step. Teams that need formal approval typically export and approve outside Toggl.
Lock periods
After approval, timesheets should be locked — preventing further edits to historical data. This protects the integrity of the approved record.
Configurable lock periods:
- Harvest: Lock approved timesheets immediately on approval. Retroactive edits require a new approval cycle.
- Hubstaff: Configurable lock period (e.g., lock all timesheets older than 14 days).
- Clockify: Manual lock per timesheet period after approval.
For payroll-connected time tracking: once payroll runs, the corresponding time period should be locked permanently. Editing approved payroll-period timesheets creates accounting inconsistency.
Approval workflows and employee trust
Timesheet approval is structurally a verification mechanism. How you communicate it determines whether employees experience it as trust or surveillance:
Trust-consistent framing: “We review timesheets to make sure nothing’s missing and billing is accurate — not to verify you’re working.”
Surveillance-consistent framing: “All time entries must be approved before we consider them valid work.”
The same workflow, communicated differently, produces different culture effects. In a trust-first remote team, the approval framing should emphasise data quality and billing accuracy, not verification of work.
Weekly vs bi-weekly vs monthly approval
| Cadence | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | Catches errors while memory is fresh; aligns with payroll | More admin overhead for managers |
| Bi-weekly | Reduced manager burden | Errors persist for 2 weeks before caught |
| Monthly | Least admin | Errors may be difficult to reconstruct; not suitable for weekly payroll |
For payroll-connected time tracking: match the approval cycle to the payroll cycle. If you run payroll bi-weekly, approve timesheets bi-weekly.
For billing-connected time tracking: approve before each invoice run. If you invoice monthly, approve timesheets in the last 3 days of the month.