About this site

Fifty notes on timesheet management and approval workflows, written for the people who operate them: payroll and finance staff, project leads, line managers who approve, and the person who ends up owning the process when it breaks.

What it covers

The act of approval and everything around it. What a signature on a week asserts. How to measure whether anybody read anything. What a recorded week is actually made of, and why a perfectly flat one is a warning. The payroll cutoff and what the deadline does to quality. Who approves, whether they can, and what happens when they are away. Corrections, reopened periods and disputes. Where approved hours travel and the different standards applied at each destination.

What it leaves out

No product names, no vendor comparisons and no pricing. Selecting and implementing timesheet software is a separate subject with plenty of material written about it, and mixing the two produces advice that is really a purchase recommendation.

No figures presented as benchmarks. The refusal rates, review intervals and correction rates described here are patterns, not statistics, and the only numbers worth acting on are the ones from your own system.

Not advice

Nothing here is legal, payroll or accounting advice. Working-time rules, record-keeping duties, overtime entitlements, grant audit standards and capitalisation criteria differ by jurisdiction, by sector and by funder, and they change. Where a note touches on any of those it is describing the shape of the problem, not the rule that applies to you.