Approving timesheets

How do you approve a timesheet?

Open Timesheets (/timesheets). It opens on the Submitted tab, which is your queue.

The queue is a list, not a workbench. Nothing is decided here: the employee name is the only link, and it opens the one timesheet.

The queue

Five figures across the top. The first four filter the list.

Tile	The hint under it
Draft	Not yet submitted
Submitted	Awaiting your approval
Approved	Decided and closed
Rejected	Sent back for correction
Hours this period	Total logged across the queue you are looking at

The table has four columns.

Column	What it tells you
Employee	The name, the period, and when it was submitted. Click it to open
Billable	A bar, and how much of the total can be charged
Tracked / manual	Tracked time first, then time added by hand
Status	Where it is

Caution

You cannot approve from this list. There is no approve button and no bulk action. Every decision is made on the timesheet itself, one at a time.

The only search here is by employee name. There is no date filter and no team filter. Long queues show the latest 100.

Deciding one

Click the name. The detail page opens with three figures - Submitted total, Billable and when it was submitted - then the breakdown.

1. Is the total plausible for the period? A 60-hour week and an 8-hour week both deserve a look.

2. How much of it is manual? Read the Time breakdown card: tracked activity on one side, manual time on the other. Tracked time has evidence behind it. Manual time has a sentence.

3. Did they leave a note? The Employee notes card only appears when they wrote one. It usually answers the thing you were about to ask.

4. If anything is unclear, press View activity timeline. It opens their day: sessions, applications, idle gaps, screenshots. That is the evidence.

5. Approve or Reject, with a note in Notes (optional).

Skip sends you back to the list without deciding. It records nothing and the timesheet stays in the queue. Use it when you need to ask something first.

The note is the job

Danger

The product does not make you write one. Reject is clickable with the note box empty, and the employee then sees a rejection with no reason at all.

That is the one failure this screen allows, and it is yours to prevent. Manual time forces a reason; a timesheet does not.

On an approval the note is optional and usually unnecessary. On a rejection it is the whole thing. The employee sees exactly what you write and nothing else.

Write what to fix:

Good	Thursday shows 11 hours with 4 hours manual and no reason given. Add the reason and resubmit.
Good	This period includes two days of leave. Remove them and resubmit.
No use	Incorrect.
No use	Please check.

When they resubmit the same dates it reuses the same timesheet, so the history stays in one place.

Who can do what

Role	Sees the queue	Can decide
Manager	Yes	Yes
Tenant admin	Yes	Yes
Auditor	Yes	No
Employee	No - sent back to My timesheets	No

An auditor reaching a submitted timesheet gets no decision card. That is deliberate.

Caution

An auditor also loses the names. The screen only loads the people list for a reviewer, so for an auditor the employee reads “Unknown” and the History table shows raw user ids instead of names.

Worth knowing before you hand an auditor a timesheet as evidence. See What an auditor can see.

The history

Every timesheet carries a History table: When, Transition, Actor and Notes. One row per status change.

The transition is written in the product’s own words - submitted → approved - not the badge labels on the list.

That table is what gets read months later when somebody questions an invoice.

Next: Approving added time · Who needs you today