Reviewing and approving timesheets

Reviewing happens in one place. Approvals in the sidebar, under Timesheets, is your queue of everything waiting on you. It appears once the Approvals module is on and you are an owner, an administrator or a manager, or at least one submission has been assigned to you for review.

Administrators and the company owner see every submission in the company. Everyone else sees only the submissions assigned to them. Nobody can review their own timesheet, whatever their role.

The queue

Four tabs split the queue: Waiting for review, Rejected, Approved and All. Each row shows the person, the period, logged against expected hours, the billable share, the status and how long it has been waiting. A warning triangle marks anyone who logged less than expected, with the shortfall in the tooltip.

Selecting a name opens the submission: every entry for the period grouped by date with project, task, notes and duration, daily totals, and the full history of the submission.

Approve

From the submission page, select Approve. From the queue, use the tick on the row. To clear several at once, tick the rows on Waiting for review and use Approve selected; anything that cannot be approved is skipped and named in the message, rather than silently dropped.

Approving sends the person an email confirming who approved it and that their entries are now locked.

One check runs before approval goes through, so that you never sign off on numbers other than the ones you looked at. If any entry in the period changed after it was submitted, the approval is refused and you are told to ask for a resubmission. The submission page flags it in advance too: Entries changed after submission. Ask for a resubmission before approving.

Reject

Select Reject… on the submission page, write what needs correcting, then Reject with reason. A reason is mandatory, there is no way to send something back without one.

Rejecting unlocks the period for its owner, records the reason in the history, and emails it to them. They correct their entries and resubmit, which brings the submission back into your queue.

What approval locks

Submitting already locks a period's entries. Approving keeps them locked permanently, short of an administrator stepping in. For every date in the period, the owner cannot edit, move or delete an entry, and cannot add a new one. The lock is enforced on the record itself, so it holds on the web app, the mobile apps and any integration that writes time, including time logged from the Jira panel.

Rates, prices and invoice links are deliberately outside the lock, which is what lets an approved period be invoiced without unlocking anything.

To undo an approval, an administrator or the owner opens the submission and uses Reopen with a reason. That returns it to open, unlocks the entries and emails both the person and the reviewer, apart from whoever did it. The period then has to be submitted and approved again.

Approved time and invoicing

Under Company settings, Approvals there is a setting called Only invoice approved time. With it on, new invoices only pick up time from approved submissions, and the new invoice screen warns you up front how much uninvoiced billable time, and what value of it, is being left out for want of approval. People not marked as requiring approval are never held back by this, since they never produce a submission. See creating an invoice for the rest of that flow.

Closing a period

Closing is an administrator action and it is not the same as approving. Open Manage approval periods from Company settings, Approvals, pick a period and select Close period. Once closed, nobody can change an entry in it and no further submission or review is possible.

The period page counts what is still unresolved before you close: open, waiting for review, rejected, and people who have not started. If anything is outstanding, the button becomes Close period with exceptions and you have to confirm. Closing never approves what was left behind, it only stops the clock on it.

Reopening a closed period. An administrator can reopen one with a reason. Every submission in the period gets the reopening recorded in its history, and review can continue where it left off.

Notifications

The last two only go out if Send reminder emails is on for the company, and never before 09:00 in the company time zone. The first four are part of the workflow and always send.