Timesheets & approvals
Fill in a weekly grid, and optionally submit, approve, lock, and automate finished time — with deadlines, reminders, and per-person rules.
The Timesheet is a weekly grid of your time: rows are your projects, columns are the seven days of the week, and each cell is the total you logged there that day. It's a fast way to fill in or clean up a week at a glance — and, optionally, to submit and approve that time on a schedule.
Filling in the grid
Use + Select project… to add a row (grouped by client). Empty rows can be removed.
Enter time however you think of it — the grid understands 1:30, 1:30:00, 1.5, 90m, 1h30m, or a plain number of hours. Setting a cell to 0 deletes that entry.
A day with several entries shows a total and a count — click it for a breakdown where you can edit each entry or add another.
Row totals, day totals, and the week total update as you go. Navigate weeks with ← / This week / →. On a phone the grid stacks into per-day cards.
Managers can switch to a teammate (view-only ones are marked "(view)"). Any entry you create or edit for someone else is logged on their behalf and stamped with who entered it (for example, "Entered by Jordan"), so the record stays honest.
Turning on approvals
None of the controls below exist until an admin turns them on in Settings → Timesheets. Most solo users leave them off. Timesheets are two independent features you can run separately or together:
- Lock on a cadence — a manager freezes each finished period so its time can't be changed. No submission step.
- Timesheet approvals — everyone submits each period for sign-off; an approver approves it or sends it back to fix. Approved periods lock automatically.
Each has its own cadence — weekly, bi-weekly (with an anchor week), semi-monthly (1st–15th / 16th–end), monthly, or custom (every N days/weeks from a start date). A workspace can, for example, submit weekly but lock monthly.
Under Settings → Timesheets, set the schedule for approvals, then press Start timesheet approvals — changing the settings alone doesn't turn it on, and while it's off you'll see a reminder to press Start. Start asks which period to begin from; it defaults to the current full period (on a monthly cadence, today lands you on the whole current month), and you can move it earlier or later. Nothing before that date is ever part of approvals — so people can't page back through old weeks and submit history. Turning it back off asks you to confirm, so nobody switches it off by accident. Your schedule and rules are kept either way.
Deadlines and the escalation ladder
Approvals run on two deadlines, set under Setup:
- Timesheets due — an offset from the period end (N days or hours, before / on / after it ends).
- Approval due — how long after that the approver has to approve.
When a deadline passes, the period doesn't just sit open — it escalates up a level:
You edit and submit your own timesheet.
You're locked out of that period; your approver can submit on your behalf (stamped as entered by them).
The approver can no longer approve it; admins approve on their behalf.
So "late" is never self-serve — it always moves up the chain, and admins are the top rung. Once a period's submit deadline has passed with nothing submitted, the grid shows it as Closed rather than Open — a past period, no longer a live to-do. Periods before your approvals start date aren't shown at all.
Auto-submit submits each person's tracked time when the submit deadline passes. Auto-approve approves anything still pending when the approval deadline passes. Turn on either (or both) under Setup to let periods finish themselves.
A single period sometimes needs different dates — a bank holiday moves payroll. Under Settings → Timesheets → Period adjustments, pick a period and set its Timesheets due and/or Approvals due to specific dates. It overrides just that period (workspace-wide); clear both to fall back to the usual schedule. Reminders and the escalation ladder follow the adjusted dates.
While approvals is on, Schedule and approvers shows as plain read-only values — the cadence, the two deadlines, automation, the start date, and who approves whom — so a stray edit can't move everyone's deadlines. Press Edit settings to unlock, make your changes, then Save changes — a dialog names exactly what will change ("Approval due: 1 day → 2 days after it's due", "Approver — Sam: default → Alex") before it applies. Everything under Editable anytime — email reminders, one-off period adjustments, and custom rules — stays editable without unlocking, each marked Live.
Submitting and approving
Turning approvals on adds two sub-sections to Timesheets, alongside the grid:
- Submit — each finished period as a review card: the destination workspace and who approves it, a per-project breakdown, the total, and a light "I confirm this timesheet is accurate" check before you send it. After you submit you can still edit on the grid until it's approved.
A period with no time logged still shows a Submit 0m button — sending it is how you confirm you tracked nothing that period, not an oversight. Once a period is past its submit deadline, it drops into a collapsed Past deadline group at the bottom of Submit: still viewable (with its hours and projects), but the window to submit it yourself has closed — it's escalated to your approver, and it leaves the group once they submit or approve it.
The grid always shows one week, but your approval period might be a month. When the period is longer than a week, a strip above the grid names the full period range and which week you're on (e.g. week 2 of 5), with one-tap jumps to the period's first and last week — so filling a month never means guessing which weeks belong to it. The Timesheets nav item also carries a small count of actions waiting on you; it turns red when something's overdue or a timesheet came back to you to fix.
- Approve (approvers only) — an inbox of everyone you approve. Rows are collapsed (name · total · Approve) so a big team stays scannable; expand any one for its breakdown, jump straight to that person's Hours report for the period, approve all pending at once, or send one back with a reason. Anyone who hasn't submitted shows as Not submitted with a one-click Remind.
Send back always reopens the period so the person can fix and resubmit, and the reason shows in-app. You choose per send-back whether to also email them: the dialog offers Send back & email and Send back, no email (plus Cancel). Use the quiet option when you're sitting next to them or have already pinged them another way — there's no workspace-wide setting to manage, just the choice in the moment.
If you're shared into another workspace and it has put you on its approval flow, that workspace appears under your own Submit as its own section — so you always see what time, which projects, and which workspace each timesheet is going to, and submit one workspace at a time on its cadence. Collaborators are exempt by default; a workspace opts you in with an External collaborators rule (see below).
The Period tab works for collaborators too. A Submitting to switcher at the top lists each workspace you're shared into; pick one and you get that workspace's full period on one screen, showing only the projects it shares with you. Fill the grid in the same way as your own — time you log there saves into that workspace — then submit it from the same screen.
Email reminders
Under Email reminders, choose which nudges go out and when, grouped by who receives them:
- To the person submitting — one or more "time to submit" nudges before the due date.
- To the approver — someone submitted (off by default), everyone's timesheets are ready to review, approve reminders before the approval-due date, and a heads-up when someone hasn't submitted.
- To admins — an approver missed their deadline, and a workspace summary after the approval-due date. You pick whether admin mail goes to Owners or all Admins.
Reminders are delivered by email today. They fire from a background sweep, so they arrive around the deadline, not to the minute.
Who approves whom
By default a person is approved by their team's manager, falling back to any admin if they have no team. You can override this per person under Approvers (or on the People roster) — pick a specific named approver for anyone who doesn't follow the team rule.
An external collaborator has no team or membership to carry a manager, so by default their timesheets can only be approved by an admin. To route them to a specific person, open People and find the External collaborators section (shown when approvals is on) — set a Timesheet approver for each, or leave it on Admins only.
Manual lock (a payroll cutoff)
Separate from cadence locking, Manual lock freezes all time dated before a day you pick, in one click — a clean payroll cutoff. It works on its own with no cadence, and managers and admins can still override it to make a correction.
Frozen entries show a lock icon. A manager or admin can still fix one, but editing or deleting it asks them to confirm they’re overriding the lock, and the change is logged. Admins see the recent overrides under Settings → Timesheets → Recent lock overrides — who changed whose frozen time, and when. The owner of the time can’t override their own lock.
Custom rules & exceptions
Not everyone fits one policy. Under Custom rules & exceptions you can override the approvals rules for a person, a team, a role, or external collaborators — the most specific rule wins (person beats team beats role beats collaborator beats the workspace default).
Each rule can either exempt that scope from approvals entirely, or override any of: cadence (e.g. a monthly contractor in a weekly workspace), timesheets-due, approval-due, approver, auto-submit, and auto-approve — leaving everything else inherited.
A built-in Viewers → Exempt rule sits at the top of the list. It's fixed — it can't be edited or deleted — because a viewer can only view time, never submit it.
People shared into your projects from another workspace (external collaborators) are exempt from your approvals by default — their time is theirs to manage. Add an External collaborators rule if you want them on your submit/approve flow with custom deadlines and approver.
Approvals apply from the start date you pick forward. Periods before it are left alone — nobody gets emailed or auto-actioned about a backlog of history, and people can't page back and submit old weeks.
When both controls are on, approving a period also locks it — so once it's approved, that time is final without a second step.
CSV and PDF exports for billing, payroll, and your records.