Timesheet

What is a timesheet?

A timesheet is a record of the hours an employee worked over a set period, usually a week or a pay period. For each day it shows when work started and finished and how long the breaks were, and adds those up to the hours payroll pays. Written as two words, time sheet, it means the same thing.

In a shift team the timesheet is the counterpart of the schedule. The schedule says who should work when. The timesheet shows what actually happened: the late finish, the swapped shift, the break that ran short. Payroll pays from the timesheet.

Agencies and consultants also keep timesheets to bill clients per project. This page is about the other use, timesheets for hourly and shift-based employees.

What a timesheet records

A useful timesheet answers three questions for every shift: who worked, when, and whether someone checked it. In practice that comes down to these fields.

How to work out the hours on a timesheet

Take the finish time, subtract the start time and any unpaid break, and add the days together. The step that goes wrong is the conversion. Minutes are sixtieths of an hour, so 7 hours and 45 minutes is 7.75 hours, not 7.45.

Priya works at a café on a 24-hour contract. This is her week:

Her week adds up to 24:45, or 24.75 hours, so she worked 45 minutes over her contract. If the total goes to payroll as 24.45, she is paid 18 minutes short. The same slip every week across a team of twenty is 312 hours a year that nobody notices until someone checks their pay.

Converting minutes on a timesheet to decimals

Divide the minutes by 60. Most timesheets round to two decimals, so 20 minutes becomes 0.33 and 40 minutes becomes 0.67.

Rounding the decimals for display changes nothing. Rounding clock-in times to the nearest quarter hour does change what people are paid, and needs a rule that evens out over time.

Types of timesheet: paper, spreadsheet, or clocking

Timesheets also differ by period: weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, usually matching the pay period. A weekly timesheet is easier to check even when payroll runs monthly, because people still remember what happened last Tuesday.

If you keep timesheets in a spreadsheet, the free timesheet template in Excel already has the formulas for breaks and weekly totals.

Is a timesheet a legal requirement in the UK?

No UK law requires a timesheet as such, but the law does require records that a timesheet usually provides. Under regulation 9 of the Working Time Regulations 1998, employers must keep records adequate to show they comply with the weekly working time limit, the limits for young workers and night workers, and the health assessments for night workers, and keep those records for two years. The format is up to the employer. Since 1 January 2024 an employer does not have to record each worker's daily hours if it can show compliance another way.

Pay is the second reason. Regulation 59 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 requires records sufficient to show that each worker is paid at least the minimum wage, kept for six years. For staff paid by the hour, the hours worked are the heart of those records.

How the weekly limit and the opt-out work is explained under the Working Time Directive UK.

Timesheet, time card, and schedule

A time card is the older and narrower version: a card stamped by a clock at the start and end of each shift. A timesheet takes those times, subtracts the breaks, and turns them into hours per day and per week, so one timesheet replaces a stack of cards.

The schedule is the plan. Putting the two side by side each week shows where the plan and the day drifted apart: shifts that ran long, early starts nobody asked for, an open shift filled at the last minute. That check is the core of timesheet approval.

What goes wrong on a timesheet

The most common error is a shift with a start and no finish. Someone forgot to clock out, and the timesheet shows either nothing or whatever the system filled in. Fix it the same week, with the employee, while they still know when they left.

Breaks come second. A break that was taken but never recorded adds paid time. One that was recorded but not taken can mean the shift was short of staff, which is worth knowing for the next schedule.

Then there are the small patterns: clocking in ten minutes before every shift, a colleague clocking in for someone who is running late, or padding hours by a few minutes a day. On one timesheet each looks trivial. They show up when you compare weeks.

Timesheets in Shiftbase

In Shiftbase, time tracking fills the timesheet from clocking. Employees clock in and out in the app, or on the Kiosk: a web page on a shared PC or tablet where each person picks their name and enters their own PIN. Managers approve or decline each registration in the web app or the mobile app, and a declined registration stays visible instead of being deleted. A report sets the worked hours against the scheduled hours per department, and the payroll report exports the approved hours to Excel or CSV for whoever runs payroll.