Timesheets and project time in Pitch N Hire HRMS
Pitch N Hire timesheets record where working hours went, against the project, task and client they belong to, separately from the attendance record that determines pay. Employees log time through the week, mark it billable or non-billable, and submit for approval by the project owner. Approved hours roll up into utilisation views and client-ready summaries for invoicing.
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What timesheets includes
How do employees record time against a project or task?
Entry is made against a project and, where the project defines them, a task beneath it, with a duration and an optional note describing the work. The list of projects a person can book to is restricted to their assignments, which removes the largest source of bad timesheet data: hours landing on the wrong engagement because a long dropdown was scrolled carelessly. People log as they go, from the web or the mobile app, and the week accumulates rather than being reconstructed on Friday afternoon from memory. Duplicating the previous week is available for genuinely repetitive work, and each copied entry still has to be reviewed before submission. A note on an entry survives into the approval and the client rollup, so the answer to what a day was spent on does not evaporate the moment the week is signed off.
- Bookable projects are limited to the person's actual assignments.
- Entries carry a task and a note, not just a number of hours.
- Copying a previous week still requires review before submission.
How are billable and non-billable hours separated?
Every entry carries a billable flag, and the project supplies its default so the common case requires no thought from the person logging. Internal work, pre-sales, training and administration sit on non-billable projects and are still recorded, because time that disappears from the record is time that cannot be explained when a month looks light. An approver can change the flag on an entry rather than deleting it, and the change is visible in the history alongside who made it. When hours are rolled up, the billable and non-billable totals are always presented separately, so the utilisation conversation is about a ratio rather than a single figure whose composition nobody remembers. Rates and invoicing values are held outside this module, so the timesheet stays a record of time rather than a place where a commercial figure can be edited by anyone logging hours.
- Billable defaults come from the project and can be overridden per entry.
- Non-billable work is recorded, not omitted.
- Rollups always split the two totals rather than combining them.
How does weekly timesheet submission and approval work?
A week is submitted as a unit. Before it goes, the employee sees their own total against whatever expectation the policy sets, so an obviously incomplete week is caught by the person best placed to fix it. Submission routes to the project owner or the approver named on the project, and where a week spans several projects each owner approves their own portion, which prevents a manager signing off hours booked to an engagement they have no visibility of. An approver can approve, or return the week with a comment, but cannot silently rewrite it: the correction is made by the person who did the work and resubmitted. Reminders go to open weeks past the deadline. Approved weeks lock, and a change afterwards needs an explicit reopen that is recorded with the user who performed it.
- A week spanning several projects is approved in parts by each owner.
- Approvers return with a comment rather than editing the entries.
- Approved weeks lock and require a logged reopen to change.
How is utilisation calculated from timesheet data?
Utilisation compares billable hours against available hours for a period, and both sides of that comparison are configurable rather than assumed. Available hours come from the person's shift, their approved leave and holidays, so somebody away for half a period is not judged against a full one. Billable hours come from approved entries only, which is why the approval step matters more than it first appears: unapproved time is not yet a fact. Views break down by person, team, project and client for any date range, and non-billable time is shown next to billable rather than hidden, so a low ratio can be attributed to bench time, internal projects or training instead of guessed at. A period can be re-run once late approvals land, so the figure does not freeze at a moment when half the weeks were still open. For trend analysis alongside headcount, cost and attrition, the same data feeds HR analytics.
- Available hours account for shift, approved leave and holidays.
- Only approved entries count toward billable time.
- Non-billable categories are shown, so a low ratio can be explained.
How do you roll up hours by client and project?
Approved entries aggregate along the hierarchy they were logged into: task within project, project within client, over any date range you choose. The rollup carries the entry notes, so a summary can be sent as a status update or attached to an invoice without someone rewriting it into prose first. Filters isolate a single person, a team, a billable category or a phase of work, which is how a variance between quoted and actual hours gets investigated rather than argued about. Because the same approved entries produce both the client rollup and the internal utilisation view, the number quoted to a customer and the number discussed in a review meeting come from one source. Exports are available for finance systems that raise the invoice, and the export records which entries were included so a later query can be answered exactly.
- Task, project and client totals derive from the same approved entries.
- Entry notes carry through into the rollup.
- Exports record which entries they contained for later reconciliation.
How does a timesheet differ from attendance?
They answer different questions and are stored separately for that reason. Attendance is presence measured against a shift, and it produces the payable days that determine pay. A timesheet is allocation: which project, task and client the hours belonged to, and whether they were billable. A person can be present for a full week and have a timesheet that does not total the same, and neither record is necessarily wrong, because one is measuring the door and the other is measuring the work. Pitch N Hire never derives one from the other. Instead it lets you compare them, so a persistent gap between attended and allocated hours becomes a question for a project manager rather than an invisible drift. Treating attendance as a billing source is the mistake this separation exists to prevent. The comparison runs per person and period, so the check is routine rather than an investigation.
- Attendance produces payable days; timesheets produce utilisation and billing.
- Neither dataset is calculated from the other.
- The gap between attended and allocated hours is reportable.
What happens when a timesheet is late, rejected or reopened?
Open weeks past their deadline are listed for the employee and escalated to the approver, so chasing is a visible queue rather than a set of individual messages. A returned week comes back with the approver's comment attached to the week or to specific entries, and the employee corrects and resubmits; the original submission stays in the history, so a dispute about what was first claimed can be settled from the record. A locked week can be reopened by an authorised user when a genuine correction is needed after approval, and the reopen is logged with the reason, the user and the time. This is the same discipline the time and attendance tracking category applies to payable days, for the same reason: a figure that has already been billed or reported should not be able to change quietly.
- Overdue weeks appear as a queue for both employee and approver.
- Returned weeks keep the original submission alongside the correction.
- Reopening a locked week is logged with the reason and the user.
Does timesheet data reach payroll?
Only where your model requires it. For salaried employees, pay comes from attendance-derived payable days, and the timesheet is used for utilisation and client billing rather than for the payslip. Where people are paid for time actually booked, such as contractors on an hourly engagement, approved timesheet hours can be passed to the payroll run for the period they fall in, and the approval lock is what makes that safe: unapproved hours never reach a payment. Because both routes exist in Pitch N Hire HRMS, an organisation running salaried staff and contract resources side by side does not need a second system for one of them. Which route applies is set per employment type, so nobody has to remember to treat a particular group differently each month. Where hours do drive pay, the same period lock that governs payable days covers the timesheet, so a paid week cannot be reallocated after the fact.
- Salaried pay is driven by attendance, not by the timesheet.
- Approved timesheet hours can drive pay for time-based engagements.
- The route is set per employment type rather than chosen each period.
Attendance data and timesheet data compared
| Question | Attendance answers | Timesheets answer |
|---|---|---|
| What is being measured | Whether the person was at work, and for how long | Which work the hours went into |
| Unit of record | A punch pair against a shift and a date | An entry against a project, task and client |
| Who confirms it | The reporting manager, on exception | The project owner, on the whole week |
| Where it goes | Payable days and loss of pay in the payroll run | Utilisation views and client invoicing |
| Cost of getting it wrong | Pay is incorrect for that period | Billing and utilisation are incorrect for that project |
| How it is corrected | A regularisation request against a single date | A returned week, reallocated and resubmitted |
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Timesheets — FAQs
Is a timesheet the same as attendance?
Can employees log time from their phone?
How are billable and non-billable hours handled?
Who approves a timesheet?
How is utilisation calculated?
Can we bill a client directly from timesheet data?
What stops people logging time to the wrong project?
Can a timesheet be changed after approval?
Do timesheets feed payroll?
Do we need a separate project time tracking tool?
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