Projects, Tasks & Time Tracking

6. Timesheets and the Approval Workflow

Individual time entries are consolidated into timesheets, managed through TimesheetsPage and a TimesheetDetailPage. Timesheets are organised by period and are typically weekly, grouping a person's entries for a span of time into a single reviewable document.

Timesheets follow a submit-and-approve workflow. The owner submits a timesheet for approval, and a manager can then approve or reject it. Each of these transitions — submit, approve, reject — is an explicit operation, so a timesheet's state reflects a deliberate action rather than a passive edit.

To make review manageable at scale, a Pending Approvals queue (PendingApprovalsPage) collects the items awaiting a decision, so an approver can work through outstanding timesheets in one place instead of hunting for them. This mirrors the centralised approval pattern used elsewhere in the system for documents such as leave requests and expense claims.

The approval step is what gives recorded time its authority. Until a timesheet is approved, the hours on it are provisional; approval converts them into an accepted record of work. Because timesheets are built from the underlying billable and non-billable time entries, approving a timesheet effectively signs off on the billable total that will feed downstream billing and reporting. The period-based organisation keeps this review on a regular cadence, so time is confirmed in orderly batches rather than entry by entry.