Timesheet approval has a bad reputation, and it is earned. Done badly it is a manager scrutinising how their team spent Tuesday — slow, resented, and no use to anyone.
Done well it is a five-minute check that stops a wrong invoice reaching a client. Those are different activities that happen to share a button.
What approval is for
One thing: the hours are about to become an invoice, and an invoice is hard to take back.
A time entry on the wrong project moves revenue between clients. An entry marked billable that was internal turns up on a bill and costs you a difficult email. A missing entry means work you did for free. Once an invoice is out, correcting any of it means a credit note and a conversation that makes you look disorganized.
Approval is the last cheap moment. That framing decides everything else about how you run it.
What the approver should look at
Not "did this person work hard enough". Four things:
- Is anything on the wrong client or project? By far the most common error and the most expensive.
- Is the billable flag right? Especially on the ambiguous categories your policy defines — travel, internal meetings, rework.
- Is anything obviously missing? A three-hour Tuesday on a week that was plainly full.
- Is anything about to go over budget without anyone having said so?
That is a genuine five-minute job for a week of one person's entries, and every item on it protects the invoice rather than judging the person.
Approve weekly, at the smallest useful unit
Weekly, not monthly. Monthly approval means someone is reviewing entries from four weeks ago that nobody can remember, immediately before the invoice run, when there is no time to fix anything. Weekly keeps the memory fresh and the queue small.
Per person, per week is the unit most agencies land on. Per project sounds tidier and fails as soon as one person works on six projects.
Set a deadline everyone knows. Timesheets in by Monday noon, approved by Tuesday noon, invoicing Wednesday. The specific days matter far less than that they never move.
Make the approver's life mechanical
Most approval friction is caused by tools that show a manager 47 undifferentiated entries and ask them to form a view.
What actually helps:
- Surface the exceptions. Entries on projects this person has not touched before; anything pushing a project past its budget; days well under or over normal; billable flags that disagree with the project's default. Ten flagged entries out of 47 is a review. Forty-seven entries is a rubber stamp.
- Show budget context inline. "This project is at 92% of budget" next to the entries is the single most useful thing on the screen.
- Allow approving in bulk with individual exceptions. Approving one at a time guarantees the process gets skipped in a busy week.
Rejection is a conversation, not a button
The fastest way to make approvals hated is to bounce a week back with no explanation. The person has to work out what was wrong, and the natural inference is that their honesty was the problem.
Two rules:
Rejection always carries a reason, specifically enough to act on. "Tuesday's 6 hours look like they belong to Northwind, not Acme" — not "please review".
Never reject for the number of hours. If someone logged 32 hours in a week, that is information, and the response is a conversation about workload, not an instruction to resubmit a larger figure. An approval process that pushes back on low totals has told everybody that the totals are what matters, and you will get better-looking totals and worse data forever after.
Who approves
Whoever is accountable for the client relationship and can tell whether an entry belongs where it says it does. Usually an account or project lead, not a line manager — line management approval turns the process into a performance conversation by default, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid.
Have a named fallback for holidays. The most common cause of a broken invoice run is one approver on annual leave and nobody knowing whose job it became.
The signal that it is working
Approvals take minutes rather than being a dreaded weekly block. Corrections happen before invoicing rather than after. Nobody has to ask what happened to a project's budget, because the person who approved the hours already saw it.
And credit notes become rare — which is the whole point, and the number worth watching to know whether any of this is paying for itself.