How to Fill Out a Timesheet in 7 Simple Steps

Timesheets are critical for businesses to track employee work hours spent on project tasks, assess productivity levels and bill clients accurately. Hence, they are an all-in-one solution for employers – whether they seek improved workflows or faster client billing. Timesheets also serve as a reference for calculating payroll for full-time, part-time and contractual employees. Whether manual or automated, timesheets remain central to business operations for organizations of all sizes.

In this blog, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of timesheets, including their fundamental principles, practical applications and the precise methods for filling them out accurately.

How to Fill Out a Timesheet

To begin with, managers can fill in the basic details and share the timesheets with their employees to key in their work hours.

Step 1: Enter the Employee’s Name

Ask your employee to write their full name on the timesheet, as mentioned in their official contract. Ensure they key in their full name to avoid confusion, especially in cases where there is more than one employee with a similar/same name.

Note: You can write your employee’s name on the timesheet or ask them to add it to their respective timesheet.

Step 2: Add a Date Range

Enter the date range of the working days for which the timesheet needs to be filled.

Employers may prefer daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly timesheets, depending on their payment contract or other parameters. So, add a date range of the working days for the slot you need your employees to fill in the timesheet or ask them to fill it themselves.

Step 3: Add Project Details

While filling out a timesheet, ask your employees to add the details of the projects they’ve worked on. As most employees work on multiple projects simultaneously, it’s crucial to provide work hour details for each project to bill clients accurately. This detail helps clients assess the employees’ time spent on their projects and individual/administrative tasks.

Project Details To be Added to Timesheets

Step 4: Add Work Hours for Each Workday

Now, it’s time to fill in the work hours for each workday on the timesheet. In this section, you can ask your employees to input the clock-in and clock-out time for each workday, break time and the total hours worked. Employees’ clock-in, clock-out and break time help verify:

As an employer, you can even consider dividing work hours into sections like billable and non-billable hours so you can easily calculate billable hours for the clients. Also, make sure to give employees a brief explanation of how these differ from one another so that they can input the details of their work hours accordingly.

For example, preparing project estimates, creating budgets for future projects and sending work updates to clients would be considered billable hours. However, upgrading your email software would be accounted for in non-billable hours, as it’s not directly related to the client’s project.

Note: For hourly employees, filling a timesheet can be slightly different than salaried employees as hourly workers don’t usually have a fixed schedule or even fixed working days. Their workdays can differ greatly, such as from Tuesdays to Saturdays. Also, for each workday that an hourly employee works, employers need to track their work hours and the tasks they have worked on during each hour for better transparency.

Step 5: Determine Total Work Hours

Once your employees have filled in their clock-in and clock-out time, and total work hours for each day, it’s time to calculate the total work hours in a particular period, such as in a week, two weeks or a month. This information gives employers an overview of how many hours their employees worked in a week, fortnight or a month.

If you use spreadsheets to manage your time-tracking processes, employees can use formulas to calculate the total work hours automatically. With timesheets, an employer can also calculate overtime hours for extra shifts to calculate the payroll accordingly.

Step 6: Add Notes, if Required

Timesheets may have a column for notes – where employees can key in additional details that an employer or client needs to know. The note can comprise details like overtime notes, shift swaps or reasons for delay. For instance, if an employee took time off to cast a vote or swapped a shift with a coworker, they can mention such details in the notes.

Step 7: Submit the Timesheet for Approval

After filling in their timesheet, employees need to share them with their manager, administrator or supervisor. Depending on the existing process, an employee can either send it electronically or hand it over manually to their respective manager. The manager would review the timesheet, approve it and share it with the billing or payroll department.

Importance of Filling in a Timesheet Correctly

1. Timely Payroll Processing

Timesheets serve as proof of the number of hours an employee worked, thus helping calculate their payroll. Accurately filling timesheets isn’t just a task; it’s a responsibility that ensures the right compensation for employees. It’s crucial to understand that calculation and payment errors can lead to financial discrepancies, labor law violations and lower employee morale.

Thus, filling in timesheets ensures that employers pay employees for hours they’ve worked, including overtime, demonstrating their commitment to fair and timely compensation. In fact, employers can also use timesheet templates that have in-built fields to record time on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. These templates are easy to use as they can be downloaded and used immediately.

2. Accurate Billing

Recording time is essential to bill clients accurately and promptly. Erroneous billing can lead to overcharging or undercharging clients, which can dent your revenue, damage your firm’s reputation and even impact client retention.

Employers can use timesheets to provide an overview to a client about the number of hours spent on a project and individual tasks. Thus, it helps clients examine whether or not the project budget was used on related tasks.

3. Tracking of Project Costs

Businesses need to track project costs, whether any projects are going over budget or if any project is leading to cost overrun. With these insights, they can optimize projects, make necessary adjustments or make informed decisions to ensure profitability and account for all costs to plug in revenue leakages. For example, you can check whether a project is progressing as per the estimated budget or if there are any extra costs that you must consider to run it smoothly.

Also, by tracking project costs, you can understand whether you’re losing or making money. For instance, if a project is not profitable and has issues of cost overrun, you can consider scrapping it or addressing the issues proactively. Also, by saving historical project information, you can use it as a reference to forecast the total duration and budget for future projects of a similar nature.

4. Measurement of Employee Performance

With timesheets, employers can check how employees use their time on different activities and projects to assess whether they are spending their time strategically.

They can compare and see if some employees take more time than usual to complete their tasks. Accordingly, they can provide necessary training on skill building or time management to such employees.

They can also check if employees are completing work on or before time and possibly ask them to take on more tasks. Or employees who perform exceedingly well in an area can be identified for more crucial projects. In all these ways and more, a timesheet helps employers assess employee performance and optimize productivity and workflows.

Moreover, employers operating in hybrid or remote workplace ecosystems need to track employee work activities, hours spent at work and time invested in tasks more closely to better assess overall performance and productivity. This is where timesheets play a vital role in ascertaining employee performance and daily work activities.

5. Managing Compliance Proactively

Timesheets help employers stay compliant with the applicable regional and federal labor laws. In order to stay compliant with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) rules and regulations, employers must have an accurate record of employees’ work hours, overtime hours and leave usage. Time-tracking software helps organizations stay compliant with applicable rules and regulations by tracking accurate employee work hours, managing overtime and providing precise documentation for auditing purposes.

Time Card Vs. Timesheet

Time cards are time-stamped cards used to track an employee’s work hours, specifically when they clock in and out. Thus, this system keeps track of the beginning and the end of an employee’s working duration but has become outdated due to low visibility into their work activities.

Conversely, a timesheet is an evolving tool that captures not just the clock-in and clock-out timing but also records the time spent across tasks and projects for better billing and payroll processing.

Despite a growing shift toward digital processes, many setups still rely on paper timesheets. Mentioned below are some reasons why using manual timesheets can be disadvantageous for your firm.

Drawbacks of Using Paper-Based Timesheets

1. Prone to Errors

Paper timesheets are filled manually and are prone to erroneous entries due to illegible writing, missed digits or incorrect data entry. Such errors can lead to discrepancies in payroll processing for hourly workers. It can also result in overcharging or undercharging clients, which can cause disputes and severely damage a firm’s reputation.

2. Time Consuming

Filling timesheets manually is time-consuming and cumbersome. Plus, reviewing each sheet manually for larger teams takes up a lot of time.

Paper timesheets lead to extra workload on employees who must spend considerable time on avoidable administrative tasks. Managers, too, lose hours processing these timesheets, which they could have used for more business-critical tasks, especially when resource utilization remains a key to easing revenue pressure.

Plus, payroll processing on paper or spreadsheet-based timesheets can take weeks or even months for larger firms. On the contrary, timesheets generated using time-tracking software can reduce the time taken to a day or even a few hours.

3. Easy to Tamper

Paper timesheets are vulnerable to employee tampering. Time theft is common in workplaces, where employees fudge the numbers on their timesheets to earn remuneration even for the time they didn’t work. Time theft costs businesses thousands of dollars annually and can bring significant financial losses if not prevented on time.

4. No Backup

Paper timesheets are more likely to get misplaced or saved in the wrong folder. This makes retrieval difficult at the time of need unless you keep their copies. So, if the only copy of the timesheet data gets lost or destroyed, there’s no backup to restore the data.

5. Validating Timesheets

Once the managers receive the timesheets from employees, they need to check whether everyone has filled in their timesheets or if there are any incomplete timesheets. If the timesheet isn’t filled out properly, they may need to send it back to the employees, leading to unnecessary back and forth.

6. Inability to Generate Reports

Generating reports from paper timesheets is quite difficult and cumbersome, as you need to assess and input data manually. Even in the case of spreadsheets, it’s difficult to aggregate data to create a specific report that can showcase specific data for better assessment.

7. Scalability

For small-sized firms, paper timesheets work well. However, as their team grows, it gets complicated to track a large number of timesheets. Even tracking multiple spreadsheets can become harder.

How Digital Timesheets Can Work Wonders

1. No More Manual Tracking

Unlike paper timesheets, digital timesheets eliminate the inconvenience of manually inputting time entries by automating the process. In fact, AI-powered time-tracking software can automatically capture employee work hours and activities across various productivity and collaboration applications.

Plus, it allows you to create configurable templates that can cater to your specific needs. With these settings, you can create a timesheet template for specific users with preset validation rules and conditions.

For example, you want to allow only a certain number of employees to enter time against any ongoing project. In this scenario, you can create a timesheet template with project entry options and assign it to those employees. Such templates enable faster and more consistent time capture.

2. Streamlined Validation

Digital timesheets allow supervisors to set the validation rules for timesheet submission. This way, if someone hasn’t filled their timesheet properly, it’ll flag the issue. On top of that, if someone forgets to fill and submit their timesheets, they will automatically get a reminder message.

3. Eliminates Time Theft

Unlike paper timesheets that employees could tamper with easily, digital timesheets are securely stored in the cloud. This eliminates the likelihood of employees tampering with the data.

Organizations can leverage time tracking software with features such as a digital fingerprint scanner and face recognition time clock to prevent buddy punching and time theft.

4. Reporting Functionalities

Time-tracking software helps generate real-time reports that cater to specific needs. It also offers valuable insights into resource utilization, time usage and financial metrics for data-driven decision-making.

5. Easy Accessibility and Security

Paper timesheets can’t be retrieved once misplaced or lost. However, data is saved securely in the cloud on time-tracking software, which can be accessed whenever required, even remotely.

Bottom Line

Timesheets help employers keep track of employee work hours, how they spend their time and details of projects on which they’re spending time. Filling timesheets correctly is important to process payroll for hourly workers, bill clients accurately and measure productivity.

Though spreadsheets have been the most popular mode of tracking time, with the advent of technology, time-tracking software has taken the timekeeping process to the next level.

Entering inaccurate data and relying on manual processes can lead to data loss, revenue leakage, compliance issues and even employee-related disputes. That’s why most organizations are pivoting to digital timesheets. These automate the data capture process and eliminate the likelihood of errors and discrepancies.