Approving Your Own Hours

Every approval chain terminates. The most senior person in it either approves their own timesheet, has it auto-approved, or does not submit one.

The record described in “Approving Your Own Hours” should be created close enough to the work that people are not reconstructing a polished week from memory. When teams assess this practical implementation page for 7 minute rule payroll, they should keep entry, project selection and correction simple, while explaining which optional activity data is collected and how employees can review it.

This is where the hours carry the highest cost, where the allocation decisions have the largest consequences, and where the control is at its weakest. It is also the part of the process nobody designs, because designing it means asking the people who commissioned the process to be subject to it.

For a separate benchmark relevant to “Approving Your Own Hours”, consult the GitLab remote-work handbook. Use it to test record quality, approvals, retention, employee rights and exception handling against the real workflow rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

Where it hurts most

Partners and principals in professional firms, whose hours are billed at the highest rates and whose narratives are the ones clients scrutinise most closely.

Principal investigators and project directors on grant-funded work, whose time is the largest single cost line in most research claims and whose allocation is the one auditors test first. A PI claiming a fixed percentage to a grant every month for a year, self-approved, is the archetypal audit finding.

Owner-managers in small companies claiming research and development relief, where the whole claim rests on hours nobody independently affirmed.

In each case the honest description is that the figure is self-asserted, and in each case the claim submitted to the funder, the client or the tax authority describes it as approved.

The options

A peer or committee. Two partners approving each other, or a small group reviewing the senior cohort's allocations quarterly. Weaker than a hierarchical check and much better than nothing, and it is the only option available at the very top of an organisation.

The next tier up, where one exists. A director approved by a chief executive, a chief executive by a board committee or the chair. For grant work, the research office or finance team performing a documented check against the grant's terms.

A substantive review by a function rather than a person. Finance or a research office checking the senior cohort's allocations against funding rules, project status and plausibility, and recording the check. This is often the most practical answer because it puts the review where the expertise is rather than where the hierarchy is.

What a plausibility check looks like

It does not require anybody to know what the director did on Tuesday. It asks whether the pattern is credible.

A person claiming 100% to one funded work package while attending the board, chairing two unrelated meetings and travelling is not credible, and that is visible from the calendar. Allocations that never change month to month are not credible for anyone whose role is varied. Hours claimed to a project after its end date are not credible at all.

Three or four such tests, applied to twenty people quarterly, is an afternoon's work and it catches the things that become findings.

Making it legitimate

The resistance to this is real and is usually expressed as a question of trust. The answer is that the check is not about trust; it is about whether the organisation can demonstrate the control exists when somebody outside asks.

That framing works because it is true, and because the people being asked to accept it are the people who will have to answer the auditor. A principal investigator whose claim is disallowed for want of independent approval bears the consequence personally in reputation and in the next funding round, and the check is in their interest.

The minimum, where nothing else is possible

Where no second signature is genuinely available — a sole director, a one-partner practice — the honest position is to record the time as self-asserted and to strengthen what surrounds it: contemporaneous recording, narratives on every entry, reconciliation against the calendar, and a documented methodology for any percentage allocation.

That package is defensible. A self-approval recorded as an approval is not, and the difference is entirely in whether anybody wrote down which one it was.

What the board can reasonably ask for

Non-executives and audit committees are increasingly asked to take assurance on time-based claims, and they are rarely given anything to work with beyond a statement that the process operates.

A short annual item covering the proportion of senior hours that were self-approved, what independent check applies to them, and the result of any sampling is proportionate and specific. It also has a useful effect on the senior cohort, because an arrangement that has to be described to the audit committee tends to be improved before it is described.