What Is a Timesheet?

A timesheet is a record of the hours a person worked, broken down by day and usually by project, client or task. Payroll uses it to work out pay. A services business uses it to work out what to bill. That is the whole job of a timesheet.

The format varies a lot. It can be a paper sheet on a clipboard, a spreadsheet, or time tracking software that builds the sheet as people work. What stays the same is the question it answers: who worked, when, for how long, and on what.

What a timesheet is used for

One sheet ends up doing four separate jobs, and the people who need it want different things from it.

• Pay. For anyone paid by the hour, the sheet is the pay calculation. Overtime comes out of it too.
• Billing. A firm that sells its time invoices from the sheet. A line nobody wrote down is work nobody gets paid for.
• Project cost. Hours grouped by project show what a job really cost, next to what it was quoted at.
• A record. US employers have to keep hours worked for staff who are not exempt. The timesheet is usually the thing that proves it.

These four pull against each other. Payroll only cares about the daily total, while billing needs to know which client each hour belonged to. That is why a sheet built purely for payroll is so hard to bill from later, and why it is worth deciding up front which of the four jobs yours has to do.

Is it "timesheet" or "time sheet"?

Both are correct. "Timesheet" as one word is now the more common spelling, and it is what most software and job ads use. Dictionaries still list "time sheet" as two words, and older payroll and government forms tend to use that version. Search engines treat the two as the same word, so the choice makes no difference to what you find.

Inside your own company, pick one and stay with it. Mixed spellings across a policy document, a form and a reminder email make one thing look like two.

What goes on a timesheet

Every timesheet, however simple, carries the same core fields.

• The person. A name or employee ID, so the hours land on the right paycheck.
• The date. One row per day is the normal shape.
• Start time, end time and break. A shift from 9:00 to 17:30 with a 30 minute lunch is 8 hours worked.
• Total hours, written as a decimal rather than hours and minutes.
• What the time was for. A project, client, task or cost code. This is the field that lets you bill.
• A signature or an approval. Someone has to confirm the hours are right before they turn into money.

Anything past that list is a nice-to-have. Notes, billable flags and expense lines all help, but a sheet without them still does its job.

A filled-in timesheet, line by line

Here is one week for Derek Mullins, who is paid by the hour and splits his time across two client projects. Each line is one day: start, end, unpaid break, then the total in decimal hours.

• Monday. 9:00 to 17:30, 30 minute break. 8.0 hours. Redwood site survey.
• Tuesday. 9:00 to 17:00, 30 minute break. 7.5 hours. Redwood site survey.
• Wednesday. 8:45 to 17:15, 45 minute break. 7.75 hours. Harbour Road drawings.
• Thursday. 9:00 to 18:00, 30 minute break. 8.5 hours. Harbour Road drawings.
• Friday. 9:00 to 14:00, no break. 5.0 hours. Harbour Road drawings.

The week comes to 36.75 hours. Split by project, that is 15.5 hours on Redwood and 21.25 on Harbour Road, which is the number the client gets billed from. Payroll only needs the 36.75. If you would rather not add these up by hand, the timesheet calculator does the same sums in the browser.

Wednesday is the line worth looking at twice. 8:45 to 17:15 is eight and a half hours on the clock, less a 45 minute break, so the total is 7.75 and not 7.45. Minutes are not decimals. That one slip is the most common error on a sheet somebody totals by hand.

Timesheet, time card and time clock

Three words that get swapped around as if they mean the same thing. They do not, and the difference decides which one you actually need.

• A time clock is the thing that records the moment someone starts and stops. It captures events, nothing more.
• A time card is one person's record for one pay period, built from those clock events. It answers an attendance question: who was here, and for how long.
• A timesheet is the wider record of how the hours were spent, usually broken out by project, client or task. It answers an allocation question: what was the time spent on.

Put simply, a time card tells you Colleen was at work on Tuesday. A timesheet tells you what Colleen was working on. A warehouse that pays for attendance needs the first. An agency that bills clients needs the second. Many businesses need both, which is why software usually builds the timesheet out of the clock events instead of asking people to enter the same hours twice.

Weekly, biweekly or monthly

A timesheet covers one pay period, and the length of that period sets the shape of the sheet.

• Weekly. Seven columns, one per day. The usual sheet for hourly and shift work.
• Biweekly. Two weeks on one sheet, which matches the most common US pay cycle.
• Semi-monthly or monthly. Fewer approvals to chase, but a much longer wait before anyone spots a mistake.
• Per project. Rows grouped by job instead of by date, used by agencies and consultants who bill by project.

Paper, spreadsheet, or software

Three ways to run timesheets, and the trade-off is always the same. How much admin are you willing to do by hand?

• Paper. Costs nothing and works anywhere. Someone has to type the numbers in later, and that retyping is where errors get in.
• Spreadsheet. Free, familiar, and it can total the week for you. It falls apart once several people share one file, because nobody can tell who changed a cell.
• Software. The sheet fills in as people work, totals are automatic, and approvals leave a record. It costs money per person.

For one freelancer a spreadsheet is genuinely fine, and our free timesheet template will do the week without a sign-up. The point where it stops working is usually about five people, or the first time you have to prove a number to a client who is questioning an invoice.

Why the hours are decimal

Timesheet totals are written as decimal hours because that is the only way the multiplication works. 7 hours 30 minutes is 7.5 hours. Multiply 7.5 by a 40 dollar rate and you get 300 dollars. Try the same sum with "7:30" and you get nothing useful.

The conversion is minutes divided by 60, so 15 minutes is 0.25 and 20 minutes is 0.33. If you would rather not do it in your head, the hours to decimal converter handles single times and the timesheet calculator totals a whole week with breaks and overtime.

The 7-minute rule, and how rounding should work

The 7-minute rule is a US payroll convention for rounding clock times to the nearest quarter hour. Minutes 1 to 7 past a quarter-hour mark round down. Minutes 8 to 14 round up. It comes from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows employers to record worked time in 15 minute blocks instead of to the exact minute.

Here it is on a real day. Someone clocks in at 8:56 and clocks out at 5:04. Both times are within 7 minutes of a quarter-hour mark, so they round to 9:00 and 5:00. The day pays 8 hours, not 8 hours and 8 minutes.

TimeTracker rounds billable time to the nearest 6, 15 or 30 minutes, or leaves it exact, and you set that once for the whole workspace. Rounding never overwrites the real duration. Each entry stores the exact time and the rounded time side by side, so you can always show what actually happened.

Are timesheets legally required?

The document is not required. The record behind it is. No US law says you must keep a thing called a timesheet, but the Fair Labor Standards Act does make an employer record hours worked each day and total hours each week for every employee who is not exempt, alongside pay rate and earnings.

The law names no format. A paper sheet on a clipboard, a spreadsheet and a piece of software all satisfy it the same way. Two things follow from that, and both catch people out.

• Exempt staff are treated differently. If someone is exempt from overtime, the FLSA does not ask you to record their hours at all. Firms that bill by the hour usually track them anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the law.
• Legal and useful are not the same thing. Because no format is set, you can keep a record that passes the rule and helps you with nothing. A sheet holding only weekly totals meets the letter of it and will not settle an argument about one specific Tuesday.

States add their own rules on top. California and New York both go further than the federal baseline on record-keeping and pay stubs. This is a summary and not legal advice, so check your own state before you decide a weekly total is enough.

How long you have to keep timesheets

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, US employers keep basic payroll records for at least three years. The records used to work out pay, which includes timesheets and time cards, must be kept for at least two years. Some states ask for longer, so check the rule where you are before you throw anything away.

This is where paper quietly fails. A box of clipboards is not a record you can search when someone questions a paycheck from 18 months ago.

Where timesheets go wrong

• They come in late. Friday hours get filled in from memory on Monday, and memory rounds up.
• Rows come back blank. No project and no task, so nobody can bill the time.
• Someone forgets to clock out, and the day records 14 hours.
• The numbers change after the invoice goes out, so the books and the bill no longer agree.

Those four are the reason approvals and locking exist. A submitted timecard routes to an approver who can approve it, ask for changes, or reopen it, and approved periods lock against edits with every change recorded. You can also require a description or a task on every entry, so sheets stop coming back with blank lines. If someone forgets to clock out, the app spots the open session and tells them.

How to fill out a timesheet

• Write the hours down the same day you work them. This one habit fixes most timesheet problems.
• Log the start time, the end time and any break, rather than a guess at the total.
• Put every entry against a project or task, including internal work.
• Convert to decimal hours before you total the week.
• Compare the total against your scheduled hours and explain any gap before you submit.
• Submit it on time, so nobody is chasing you on payroll day.

One thing worth being straight about: getting hours into payroll is a CSV export, not a direct connection to a payroll provider. If you need approved hours to land in your payroll system with no file in between, we are not the right fit yet.

Let the timesheet fill itself in

Chasing sheets on payroll day is the worst part of running timesheets. Track time as the work happens, route the week to an approver, and lock it once it is signed off.

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