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Understanding Your Employees' Timesheet

Learn to manage and edit your employees' timesheets

Connecteam Experts avatar
Written by Connecteam Experts
Updated over a week ago

The Time Clock allows you to manage your employees' hours and facilitates the payroll process. Knowing how to access, read, and manage your employees' timesheets is fundamental to understanding how they've spent their time and ensuring you are on top of things. Let's take a closer look at an employee's timesheet to ensure you understand the information it offers, take full advantage of it, and have control over it! 

 

In this article, we will cover:

How to Access an Employee Timesheet

To access the timesheet of an employee:

  1. Access the Time Clock feature from the left sidebar

  2. Then click on Access clock

  3. Navigate to the Timesheets tab to view all employees who are assigned to this clock

  4. Find the user you need and click on their timesheet to access it

You can continue with this article to learn exactly what you are looking at and how to manage it.

What Can I See on an Employee's Timesheet?

Once you access the timesheet of a specific employee, you'll see the complete breakdown of their entries, whether these are shifts, breaks, and/or approved time off. Before further elaborating on the specific information displayed, remember that you can adjust the date range. By default, you will be viewing the timesheet for the current payroll period, but you can adjust the date range to your needs and view older payroll periods or select custom dates.  

Now that you've selected a date range, the user's information and entries will be displayed and calculated accordingly. 

Overview

One of the first things you can view on an employee's timesheet is the overview of their hours at the top, which displays a breakdown of the total hours worked by the user for the selected date range.

You can view the total paid hours, which are calculated by adding the total regular hours, overtime hours, and paid time off. The overview also displays the user's breaks (paid and unpaid) and unpaid time off. Additionally, and based on the calculations explained, the total pay per date will be displayed on the far right (if pay rates are enabled).

💡Tip: if you have multiple overtime rules with different multipliers, hover over the Overtime total to display a breakdown per multiplier.

Columns Breakdown

After the overview of their total hours and pay for those dates, you can view a further breakdown explaining the calculations displayed. When looking at the actual timesheet, you will view the user's entry for each day and the following information for each entry:

  • Type: This column displays the type of entry - a shift (job or break) or time off.

  • Sub-job: if the "Type" of entry is a job with a sub-job, the selected sub-job will be displayed here.

  • Start: this is the exact start time of their job, break, or time off.

  • End: this is the exact start time of their job, break, or time off.

  • Total hours: This column will display the total number of hours spent on each entry.

  • Daily total: this column will display the total number of daily hours spent on each day, which is useful for those days when a user has worked multiple jobs, has gone it

  • Total overtime: This column displays the number of hours from the "Daily Total" that are overtime hours.

  • Total regular: this column displays the number of hours from the "Daily Total" that are regular hours.

  • Weekly total: this column is the total number of hours the user worked for the selected date range. It's the sum of the "total overtime" and the "total regular" hours.

  • Issues: If there are any conflicts on the users' timesheets, they will be highlighted in this column. You can hover over the red icon to see the number of issues on their timesheets, click on it to access them, and solve them with a few simple steps. To learn more about this, click here.

Additionally, on the far right of the user's timesheets is the Shift Attachments section, where you will find the Employee notes, the Manager notes, and your shift attachments (if you have any). Hover over the notes for them to expand. 

Visual Cues

To facilitate the understanding of an employee's timesheet, we have created visual queues to indicate when certain actions or edits were made and when any issues need to be fixed. Let's go over these visual cues one by one:

  1. Daily Limit: Red numbers indicate that the daily total time exceeds the daily limit.

  2. Auto Clock Out: The exclamation mark next to the "End" column indicates that the user was automatically clocked out because they reached the daily limit or because their shift had ended, but they forgot to clock out manually. 2

  3. Modified By: The orange dot indicates someone modified/edited the shift. You can hover over the orange dot to clarify who modified it and when. 3

  4. Created By: The blue dot indicates who added the shift. You can hover over the blue dot to clarify who created the shift and when. 4

  5. Issues: The exclamation mark next to the "Date" column indicates an issue exists that day. You can hover over it to see how many issues exist that day and click on it to review them. You can either solve it or ignore it. 

  6. Time Off: Blue text indicates that it's specifically a time off entry. 

  7. Incomplete Week: The blue-crossed circle indicates that the date range selected is shorter than a week. And that the total displayed is for the selected week only.

  8. Overnight shift: The moon icon indicates that a shift spans two days, making it an overnight shift

Managing and Editing an Employee's Timesheet

Now that we've covered the type of information and cues in a user's timesheet, let's understand how you can manage and edit them. Admins can easily add and delete shifts, breaks, and time off, approve or decline pending requests, lock and approve a user's timesheet, export it, add notes, and more. 

Filtering the Type of Days

To simplify payroll day, we've created a filter that allows admins to quickly narrow down specific days within an employee's timesheet. Next to the date range, you will find this filter. By default, all days within the selected date range are visible, but you can adjust it so that only locked days, unlocked days, or unresolved issues are displayed. This way, you can quickly navigate to those days and make adjustments.

Editing Shortcuts

Editing your employee's timesheets should also be instantaneous, and we've ensured to facilitate the process for you as well with the following capabilities:

  • Edit clock-in/out time or the break hours: navigate to the "Start" and/or "End" columns and adjust the times.

  • Edit Shift Attachments: navigate to the far right side of the timesheet, where all existing shift attachments will appear.

  • Add daily hours: If you need to add a specific number of hours without necessarily caring about the clock-in and clock-out times, you can hover over the "Daily Total" column, add the total number of hours for that day, and see how a new entry is auto-populated.

  • Add weekly hours: if you just need to add a specific number of hours to the week without necessarily caring about the clock-in and clock-out times, you can hover over the "Weekly Total" column and add the total of hours for that day and see how a new entry is auto-populated.

Actions Shortcuts

Let's go over the tools that are at the admin's disposal to effectively manage their user's timesheets:

  1. Chat: By clicking on the chat icon next to the user's full name, you can open a chat directly with that employee to ask timesheet-related questions. 

  2. Next employee: In the top right corner, you can swiftly jump in between employees to review their timesheets. 

  3. Add shift: There are two easy ways of adding a shift. The first is by clicking on "Add shift" (indicator 4), and the second is by hovering over a row and clicking on the "+" icon (indicator 7).

  4. Add break: There are two easy ways of adding a break. The first is by clicking on "Add break" (indicator 5), and the second is by hovering over a row and clicking on the "+" icon (indicator 7).

  5. Add time off: easily add some time off hours to an employee by clicking on "Add time off".

  6. Delete shift: you can quickly delete a shift entry by hovering over a shift and clicking on the trash icon on the far right.

💡Tip: You can also perform certain actions in bulk by selecting multiple days and then choosing to add shifts or breaks, lock or unlock those days, or delete the entries made.

Pending Requests

You can also access your users' pending requests directly from their timesheet by clicking on the Pending Requests button at the top right and approving or declining their shift requests.

Conflicts and Issues

As mentioned above, there is a dedicated column that references the issues that exist on a user's timesheet. Additionally, you have the Conflicts. The main difference between them is that the conflicts tab displays three kinds of problems: overlapping shifts, breaks, and time off, while issues show you all the potential gaps for payroll inaccuracies.

To learn more about Conflicts, click here.

To learn more about Issues, click here.

Locking and Approval

Within your timesheets, you have the ability to both lock individual days or approve an entire pay period. This way, as you review your employee's hours, you can ensure no edits are made and continue with other matters.

The example below illustrates when a user's timesheet has yet to be approved, after it was approved, and how to reopen it if needed.

Please note: the Approval button will only appear if you view a specific pay period. It will not be available if you view a custom date range.

The example below illustrates what locked days look like. To lock a specific day, hover over the date, select the lock icon, and confirm the locking. To reopen them, simply click on its day and confirm it is unlocking.

To learn more about locking days and timesheet approval, click here.

To learn about some potential errors admins may encounter while approving timesheets, click here.

Export

You can quickly export a user's timesheet by clicking Export and choosing between Payroll Totals, Timesheets (Excel or PDF), and Shift Report (Excel or PDF).

To learn more about each time clock export option, click here.

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