Timesheet Approval: Who Signs Off, and What They Are Attesting To

Timesheet approval is treated in most organisations as an administrative step: a button pressed on Monday morning so payroll can run.

For further product context on time-record misconduct, consult further details.

The federal recordkeeping baseline appears in the federal recordkeeping regulations in 29 CFR Part 516.

It is an attestation. The approver is stating that the record is accurate, and that statement is what the employer relies on in a dispute. Most approvers have never been told this.

What approval should mean

From the employee: these are the hours I worked, including all of them.

From the manager: to the best of my knowledge this record is accurate, and I am not aware of work performed that is not recorded here.

That second clause is the one that matters, and it is the one that is almost never stated. A manager who knows someone answered messages at 10pm and approves a timesheet that does not show it has attested to something untrue — and the employer's exposure runs from what the employer knew or should have known. See off-the-clock work.

Both parties should sign

Employee attestation first. The employee confirms their own record. This is the cheapest error-detection available: the person who did the work is the person most likely to notice a missing entry.

It is also protective. A record the employee confirmed at the time is materially stronger than one they never saw.

Then manager approval. Not as a rubber stamp — as a check on plausibility.

Do not let approval substitute for the employee's own review. A manager approving records the employee has never seen removes the only person with direct knowledge from the process.

What the approver should actually check

Not every line. Four things, in about two minutes per person:

Missing punches or obviously incomplete days.

Meal periods recorded, where the state requires them, and of the required length. See meal and rest breaks.

Hours that look implausible in either direction. A week of exactly 40.00 hours across a whole team is as suspicious as a week of 65.

Anything they know about that is not shown. The Saturday call, the evening deployment, the early start for a delivery.

Tell approvers what they are signing

This is a five-minute training item that most organisations have never delivered.

Managers should know:

• Approval is an attestation of accuracy, and it is relied on
• Approving a record they know to be incomplete is worse than not approving it
• Reducing recorded hours is not a correction. If a manager believes hours are wrong, that is a conversation and a documented correction, not a silent edit. See correcting time records
• Discouraging someone from recording hours creates liability rather than saving cost
• If they cannot verify a record, they should say so rather than approve it

Permissions to check in your system

Can a manager reduce hours without the employee seeing it? If yes, that is the highest-risk permission in your configuration. It should either require employee acknowledgement or be removed.

Is every approval logged with who, when, and what version of the record?

Can approval happen in bulk, without opening the records? Convenient, and it means the attestation is meaningless. If bulk approval exists, at minimum flag exceptions for individual review.

What happens when the approver is absent? A defined delegate, or approvals stack up and get processed in a rush — which is how bulk approval becomes normal.

Timing

Weekly beats per-period. Reviewing five days is quick; reviewing two weeks is a chore, and chores get skipped.

Before payroll cut-off, with room to correct. Approval an hour before the deadline guarantees that anything found gets deferred.

Chase the missing ones. Unapproved timesheets that are simply processed anyway teach everyone that approval is optional.

The exception rate again

As with corrections, the useful signal is the absence of signal.

If approvals never produce a query, the approvals are not happening in any meaningful sense. Across a real workforce, a manager reviewing twenty timesheets a week should find something occasionally — a missing punch, an interrupted break, an unrecorded call.

A manager with a hundred percent clean approval rate over a quarter is pressing a button.

Keep the record

Approvals are part of the record. Who approved, when, and against which version.

This matters in exactly one situation, and it is the situation the whole process exists for: an employee claims they worked hours that were not paid, and the employer needs to show a contemporaneous record that both parties confirmed at the time.

Without the attestation trail, you have a spreadsheet. With it, you have evidence.