What is a timesheet? It is the day by day record of the hours one employee worked over one pay period, approved by somebody who can vouch for it, and totalled into the pay that person is owed. It answers two separate questions at once. The first is arithmetic: how many hours, at what rate, how much of it past 40, and therefore how much gross for the week. The second is evidence: what happened on a Wednesday in June, if anyone ever asks. A time card is the same thing under an older name, from when the card went into a rack on the wall. Whether it is paper, a sheet on a screen or an entry saved against an employee, the content is unchanged. The free weekly timesheet template on this site is that document at its plainest, with the breaks coming off, the overtime multiplier applied past 40 hours and the rate turned into pay, and the paid product keeps each finished week filed against the employee and the pay period it belongs to.
What a timesheet actually contains
One employee and one pay period at the top, because a sheet covering two people or two periods cannot be totalled or approved as a unit. Beneath that, a line per day carrying when work began, when it ended, how much unpaid break came off, and what is left in hours. Beneath the days, the period total split between hours paid at the regular rate and hours paid at the overtime rate, the rate itself, and the money each part produces. Beneath that, a place for the employee and the approver to sign. Job numbers, cost codes and notes are additions a business makes so the same hours can be read a second way, as labor against a job.
The arithmetic: one week, start to finish
Convert first, multiply second. Eight hours and forty five minutes reads 8.75 hours, because 45 minutes is three quarters of an hour, and 8:15 reads 8.25 in the same way. Suppose a week comes in at 8.25, 8.75, 8, 9.5 and 7.5 hours across five days: that totals 42 hours. At 22 dollars an hour, the first 40 hours are 880 dollars of regular pay. The 2 hours beyond 40 are paid at one and a half times 22, which is 33 dollars an hour, so 66 dollars. Gross for the week is 946 dollars before anything is taken out. The free weekly timesheet template runs that whole column as the hours go in.
Timecard approval: who checks it and when
Timecard approval is the step between the employee saying what they worked and the business paying for it. Somebody who was in a position to know, usually the foreman on that crew, reads the days against what actually happened, queries the ones that look wrong, and marks the period approved. Do it before pay is calculated, not after: a correction made before approval is an edit, while a correction made after a payment has gone out is an adjustment that has to be carried into the next period and explained twice. Approval is also what makes the sheet worth keeping, because an approved period is an agreed account of the week rather than one person's recollection of it.
Timesheet automation: what it removes
Timesheet automation is not a different document, it is the same document with the repetitive parts handed over. The conversion from hours and minutes into decimals happens as the entry is saved. The overtime split is applied at the 40 hour line without anyone counting the column twice. The rate is already attached to the employee, so pay appears with the hours. Sheets that have not come in on Monday morning show as outstanding instead of being chased by memory. Finished periods are stored against the right employee and can be exported when the accountant asks for the quarter. What automation does not remove is the approval: a person still has to say the hours are right.
How long the sheets have to be kept
Federal recordkeeping rules expect an employer to hold, for every non exempt employee, the hours worked each day, the total hours in each workweek and the pay figures worked out from them, with the underlying time records kept for a set period of years after the pay period ends. Nothing dictates the format, so a folder of signed pages satisfies it and so does a saved record. What fails is a period nobody can produce. Filing by employee and pay period rather than by month is the difference between answering a question about last March in a minute and spending an afternoon on it, which is what the paid product on this site is for.
Questions people ask about what is a timesheet
Is a timesheet the same as a time card?
In practice yes. Time card is the older word from when a physical card recorded the day, and timesheet is the same record however it is kept. Both have to show the daily hours and the total for the workweek.
Who is supposed to sign a timesheet?
The employee, to say the hours are what they worked, and the person approving the period, usually the crew's foreman or the owner. Two signatures turn a set of numbers into an agreed record of the pay period.
Does a timesheet have to show breaks?
Show them if they are unpaid, because unpaid break time comes off before hours are totalled and the sheet has to make clear where it went. Short paid rest periods stay inside the paid hours and need no separate line.
Can one timesheet cover a whole crew?
A crew sheet is useful for pricing a job, but pay is worked out per person, so each employee still needs their own totalled and approved period. The construction crew time card on this site does both, per person and per job.