Weekly timesheet submissions and approvals

When you first start using Intervals you will notice reminders popping up in the header to submit your timesheets. For Administrators you will be prompted to "approve" timesheets.

When will I get prompted to submit time?
- Intervals uses a Monday through Sunday work week. If you have logged time for the previous week come Monday you will be prompted to submit your timesheet.

Why does Intervals nag and put reminders in place?
- This system is built out of our struggle tracking time and trying a variety of systems. We found that if you never have to "submit" your time you were more likely not to review your time. As you've seen by the lost time calculator, the little pieces can really add up.

- We also found that it's human nature to not like tracking time and submitting timesheets. That's why Intervals is built around tracking time on tasks. If you work on something add time to the task you are working on. Timesheets are really more of a metaphor for your week than a real timesheet.

Why do I have to approve timesheets?
- We originally did not want to approve time, but we found that the weekly approval process is the best way to keep the time information clean and correct. If you don't do it weekly you can fall behind and find yourself approving and/or entering a ton of time at once.

- The approval process is there to deliberately have Administrators get a final look over the time. Before using Intervals is took us hours to approve our weekly time. It's not uncommon for our small team to work on 30 different billable projects in a week. Tabulating and reviewing that time was a nightmare before Intervals. When we approve time we typically are making sure that billable and unbillable work is set properly and that each team person is near their weekly goals.

- At Pelago we average about 240 hours per week across our billable and unbillable projects per week. It typically takes us less than 1/2 an hour to approve the previous week.

Timesheet submissions and approvals are a deliberate friendly nag to submit time weekly and approve it to help keep you and us organized.

Unfortunately there is not a way to customize the system week at this time. Intervals uses Monday as the starting day to stay compatible with the ISO 8601 standard for date and time representations. There is more information about it here if you have any interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

If you need to display time data with a different starting and ending date running reports may be a workaround. The Monday through Sunday work week impacts the timesheets and weekly/monthly calendar views but reports can be run for any time period. If you are looking for detailed time entries the summary report may be a good candidate. Depending on your exact needs that may not work but I thought I would mention it just in case.

As soon as time has been entered it can be invoiced and time does not have to be approved. If you prefer to only create invoices for approved time you could potentially make that part of your work flow and only create invoices for approved time periods. That is actually how we work.

We don't have plans to change up the weekly submission and approvals at this time. When we first developed Intervals we tinkered with a variety of different timesheet submission and approval methods. We even tried no approvals at at but after trial and error we found that the weekly submission and approval helps train people to account for their time weekly and not fall behind. Tracking time becomes part of the weekly routine.

Although there is not a way to customize the period in which timesheets are required for submission and approval other than the weekly cycle invoices can be created for any time entered in the system. Invoices can be created whether the time has been submitted and approved and locked or if it simply exists on a timesheet. As soon as time is added it is available for invoicing. A potential workaround might be to create an internal process where team members enter their time up to the date that you would like to invoice then review the time and create invoices. As long as your team doesn’t change a time entry after your review and invoicing process it might do the trick.

You are correct that when a timesheet is approved that particular week is locked and no additional time can be added to it unless the timesheet is unapproved. The approval is not a day to day approval but seven days at a time. In the example above your best bet would be to approve the timesheet after the week is complete. Hope it helps.