How to Fill Out a Timesheet (Step-by-Step Guide for Teams)

Alla Chernets -

Weekly, managers lose ~5(!) hours to chasing and correcting timesheets—hours that could be billed.

Teaching staff to log time once, correctly, converts that loss into revenue and gives you bullet-proof payroll, invoicing, and profit visibility.

👉Why the well-managed timesheet system is important, especially for managers in digital agencies and software development companies:

  • It enables you to accurately link work hours to projects and clients
  • It helps make payroll precise
  • It produces indisputable invoices
  • Business owners get profitability information clearly & transparently.

Key Insights

  • You can recover 25 % more revenue
    Digital timesheets capture 95 % of billable hours vs. 70 % with paper—every week.
  • You can give managers back 5 hours
    Auto-capture and error-proofing end the Friday “timesheet chase.”
  • You can stop the 23 % memory leak
    One-click, real-time entry logs work as it happens—no more guesstimates.
  • You can boost project profit 40 %
    Auto-tag every minute to the right client & job so your margin reports are exact.
  • You can hit “send” 85 % faster
    Smart reminders & one-tap approvals turn late sheets into same-day submissions.

How to Fill Out a Timesheet: A Step-by-Step Guide

Whether your team uses a paper timesheet template, an Excel spreadsheet, or a digital timesheet app, the principles of accurate timekeeping remain the same.

Follow these steps to ensure every minute your team spends working is correctly recorded and accounted for.

Step 1. Set Up Your Timesheet Structure

A consistent format eliminates errors and confusion in timesheet management.
Mandate the same core fields for every team entry so data roll up cleanly for payroll, invoicing, and analysis.

  • Define the Reporting Period

Decide whether you require a daily timesheet, weekly timesheet, or monthly timesheet. For client-facing projects, a daily or weekly report is standard for maximum accuracy.

  • Establish Core Columns

Set up the required columns, which must include:

    • Client / Project:
      Name the client or internal project code.
    • Task / Activity:
      Describe the work in one line (e.g., “Wireframe hero banner,” “Fix OAuth redirect bug,” “Weekly stand-up”).
    • Start – End:
      HH: MM – HH: MM (24-hour format).
    • Duration:
      Auto-calculate to the nearest 0.1 h.Billable:
      “B” or “NB” (no guesses, no blanks).
    • Break / Off-clock:
      Log any unpaid pause on its own line with 0 h billable.
Pro Tip: Add a separate line for unpaid breaks or off-clock time—your payroll team (and your clients) will thank you.
Common Mistake: Never put the task (“write code,” “review contracts”) in the Project field. Keep the project name (“Acme Website Redesign”) clean and consistent—mixing the two wrecks your profitability reports.

Step 2. Record Time Entries Accurately

Capture time the moment work happens; waiting until the end of the day—or worse, the week—invites forgetfulness, under-counting, and the slow bleed of “time leakage.”

How to do it right

  1. Hit “start” the second you open the first file/email.
    → If you wait, you WILL forget and under-bill.
  2. Hit “switch” (or start a new timer) every time you change what you’re doing—new client, new ticket, quick Slack answer, whatever.
    → Five-minute jobs add up to real money; keep them separate.
  3. Lunch, coffee, TikTok break? Hit “pause” or log it.
    → Breaks keep you legal and your boss/clients sane.
  4. If you’re on paper, round to the nearest 15 min (8 min ↑, 7 min ↓).
    → Keeps the sheet clean; apps do this for you.
  5. Before you shut the lid for the day, glance at the total.
    → Catches mistakes while you still remember.

Do these five things, and your timesheet will always match reality—no drama, no lost revenue.

Pro Tip: Make it automatic. The instant you click open a project file, hit “start” on the timer—no exceptions. That single click hooks the habit, so even five-minute tasks get caught instead of forgotten.
Common Mistake to Avoid: "Batching" time at the end of the day or week. Trying to reconstruct 40 hours of work from memory is the fastest way to lose billable minutes and guarantee your timesheet entry is inaccurate. This leads to under-billing and lost revenue.

Step 3. Add Detailed Task Descriptions

A bare-bones timesheet description like "Coding" or "Meeting" is useless for both the client and the manager. The description must provide enough context to justify the billable amount and help the manager categorize and analyze the time.

How to do it right

  1. State the deliverable and the “why” in one punchy line, copied straight from the SOW.

Bad: “Design”
Good: “UX Design—drafted 3 checkout wireframes per SOW §3.2 to reduce cart abandonment.”

  1. Short, yes—but specific enough that a manager can approve in five seconds and a client sees instantly what they’re paying for.

Step 4. Review and Categorize Hours

Before the deadline: run a 60-second scan—every entry needs a project, a task, and the right billable flag.

How to do it right

  1. Add it up: daily/weekly total must match your expected schedule—no mystery gaps or double-booked minutes.
  2. Stay legal: check overtime and break rules before you hit save; fixes are painless now, expensive later.
  3. Hit send early: late employee timesheets = late paychecks and invoices. Submit before the deadline, every time.

What Types of Timesheets Are There?

Time tracking graduated from paper to pocket-sized robots. Pick the robot that matches how big your crew is, how far they roam, and how tricky your invoices get.

Timesheet Type Best For Pros Cons
Paper Timesheet Very small teams (1-3 people) with simple, flat-rate payroll. Zero cost, physically tangible. Highly prone to error, difficult to compile, non-compliant for modern auditing, no real-time data.
Spreadsheet (e.g., Excel) Small to medium-sized teams with simple project tracking needs. Flexible templates, low cost, familiar to most users. No real-time tracking, manual data entry, no approval workflow, prone to formula errors that affect payroll.
Digital Timesheet App/Software Digital agencies and software teams requiring billing accuracy, payroll integration, and project profitability reports. Real-time tracking, automatic reminders, detailed reports, one-click submission, direct integration with project tools. Subscription cost, minor learning curve for new users.

For any agency or software firm focused on billable hours, the efficiency and accuracy provided by timesheet software or a dedicated timesheet app are non-negotiable necessities, not luxuries. They eliminate the high administrative cost of manual review.

Why TMetric is the Best Timesheet App

Pick the wrong time tracker and every timesheet is a tax—pick TMetric and it becomes a profit engine supplied with automatic timekeeping and perfect timesheet management.

In one click, it auto-captures billable minutes inside Jira, Asana, Trello, Salesforce, and QuickBooks, then turns them into client-ready invoices and margin reports before your coffee cools—no re-typing, no revenue leaks, no guesswork.

It excels where traditional methods fail by integrating directly into your team's browser and task management apps.

Managers get a live command center: TMetric’s real-time dashboard flags overdue entries, auto-routes timesheets for approval, and surfaces project burn before it hits budget—turning Friday-night chase emails into one 30-second review.

One-button exports drop pre-formatted, error-free hours straight into QuickBooks payroll or client invoices, slashing admin time and giving managers back an entire day each month to bill instead of babysit spreadsheets.

Key Features for Accuracy and Efficiency

  • One-Click Timer / Start-Stop Timer – press once inside Jira, Slack, Trello, Chrome, or the web timer; keyboard shortcut included.

Keywords that TMetric matches: one-click timer, start-stop timer, Chrome timer extension, timer shortcut, web timer.

  • Automatic Timesheet Generator / Auto Timesheet Creator – seconds auto-roll into a clean daily, weekly, or monthly timesheet report; PDF & Excel export ready.

Keywords that TMetric matches: automatic timesheet generator, auto timesheet creator, weekly timesheet export, Excel timesheet report, PDF timesheet.

  • Billable Hours Tracker / Billable vs Non-Billable Toggle – click the dollar-sign icon to mark billable time; instant billable hours summary and utilization rate dashboard.

Keywords that TMetric matches: billable hours tracker, billable non-billable toggle, utilization rate calculator, billable time report.

  • Real-Time Project Budget Tracker / Project Budget Alerts – watch live budget bar and receive email/in-app alerts before hours or cost overruns; calculate project profitability per client.

Keywords that TMetric matches: project budget tracker, real-time budget alerts, project profitability calculator, client budget monitoring.

How TMetric Simplifies Timesheet Management

Agencies leak 15 % of every billable hour to “I forgot to start the timer.”
TMetric gives those hours back—automatically.

Seamless Integrations for Your Workflow

One click (or none) and the clock runs itself, pulling project context straight from the tools your team already lives in:

  • Jira – ime posts to the exact ticket, so developers never re-type issue IDs, and every sprint report shows hour-level accuracy without extra JQL.
  • Asana / Trello – timer lives on the card, no tab-switching; one click starts the clock, and the card name + project are auto-captured, cutting weekly logging overhead by 87 %.
  • QuickBooks – export flawless data to invoice or payroll in seconds; TMetric pre-groups time by client, rate, and tax code, eliminating the 2–3 manual corrections that used to appear on invoices.
  • Salesforce – time rolls up to the exact opportunity or case, letting reps see cost-to-serve per account in real time and turn billable hours into invoices without leaving the record.

Proof TMetric’s Asana-powered timer has logged every minute for Regly’s 30-plus regulatory experts, capturing exact start/end times on hundreds of compliance tasks each month and eliminating the manual-entry errors that once lost 8–10 % of billable hours.

Because the integration auto-pulls task and project data from Asana, Regly cut weekly time-admin from roughly 2 hours per team lead to under 15 minutes—an 87 % reduction—while delivering client reports that now show second-level timestamps instead of rounded estimates.

Why Regly Chose TMetric for Seamless Time Tracking
Learn how TMetric has provided the Regly’s team with a precise, transparent, and cost-effective way to track time, seamlessly integrating into their Asana-centered workflow and significantly improving time management process.
TMetric Blog - Time Tracking Tips and Productivity HacksKate Hondarovska

Best Practices for Accurate Timesheet Management

Make the switch stick
  1. Publish a one-page “Timesheet Standard”: what’s billable, what’s not, rounding rules, and deadline.
  2. Track every non-billable minute—meetings, email, training—so you see the real cost of overhead.
  3. Managers spot-check timesheets daily; fix a 10-minute error today, not a 40-hour mess on Monday.
  4. Automate everything else. If you’re still chasing spreadsheets, you’re still donating hours to admin.

👉Install TMetric once, recover 15 % of your revenue forever.

Summary

Accurate timesheets are the cornerstone of a profitable, well-managed digital agency or software company. Mastering how to fill out a timesheet moves your business from guessing project costs and profitability to making data-driven decisions.

By transitioning from manual, error-prone processes to a system that prioritizes real-time, detailed tracking—and by implementing tools like TMetric—you can stop losing time and revenue to administrative waste and start using your team's time data to scale your business.

Ready to stop chasing timesheets and start recovering lost billable hours?

👉Try the TMetric 14-day free trial today and see how easy accurate time tracking can be.

FAQs

How quickly will automated timesheets pay for themselves?

In most service-based businesses, an automated timesheet system pays for itself almost immediately.

By recovering just 15 minutes of forgotten billable time per employee per week (a common occurrence with manual tracking), the increased revenue often covers the subscription cost several times over.

Furthermore, the time saved by managers on manual review and correction drastically reduces your overhead cost.

Is it worth implementing time tracking if you only have 5 employees?

Absolutely. Time tracking isn't just for large teams; it's for accurate business intelligence.

With five employees, every hour counts. Accurate tracking ensures you:

  • Bill clients correctly for every minute of work
  • Avoid over- or under-paying employees
  • Accurately price future projects based on historical data.

What's the best way to track non-billable time on timesheets?

The best way is to treat non-billable time (e.g., training, administrative tasks, internal projects) with the same rigor as billable time.

Create specific project categories in your timesheet software (e.g., "Internal: Training," "Admin: Payroll Prep") and require employees to use the real-time tracker for these activities.

This gives you a true picture of your operating costs.

How do I correct mistakes when filling out timesheets after submission?

In a manual system, corrections are tedious and require a paper trail. In a digital timesheet system like TMetric, a manager can easily send the timesheet back for revision, and the employee can make and note of the correction electronically.

For critical errors (e.g., a wrong project was billed), a manager can make the change and add a mandatory audit note explaining the correction before final approval.

Does a digital timesheet meet legal compliance requirements for my industry?

For most industries, a digital timesheet application is superior for compliance.

Automated tracking provides a secure, auditable, and immutable record of when an employee started and stopped work, which is essential for FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) and other labor laws regarding minimum wage and overtime.

Most good timesheet software systems are designed with these requirements in mind.