What Is a Timesheet? The Complete Guide (2026)

A timesheet is a record of hours worked, broken down by day and by project, that someone reviews and approves for payroll or client billing. For approvals and billing, Harvest, Clockify or Toggl win. For an automatic Mac record that becomes billable entries, Timing wins. Dayflow, free and open source, suits people who only need to remember what they did.

A timesheet is a record of the hours a person worked over a set period, broken down by day and usually by client, project or task. It exists so that someone else, a manager, a client or a payroll system, can pay for that time, bill for it or charge it to the right budget.

People get it wrong because they treat three different things as one. The raw notes of what you did all day are a time log. The bill you send a client is an invoice. The timesheet sits between them: a cleaned-up, totaled, reviewable summary that both sides agree is true. Most timesheet pain comes from skipping the log and trying to write the summary from memory on Friday afternoon.

Disclosure: this blog is published by Dayflow, which makes one of the tools listed near the end. The rest of this guide is about the concept, not about any product.

The short version

• A timesheet records hours worked per day, assigned to a project, client or task, over a fixed period such as a week.
• It is a summary meant to be reviewed and approved, which makes it different from a raw time log.
• It is not an invoice. An invoice turns the billable hours on an approved timesheet into money owed.
• Hourly employees, contractors, agencies, consultants and anyone billing by the hour need one. Salaried staff often fill one in for project costing.
• The most reliable timesheets are built from a record captured during the day, not reconstructed at the end of the week.

What is a timesheet, exactly?

A timesheet is a structured document, on paper, in a spreadsheet or inside an app, with a fixed set of parts:

• Who. The person whose time it is, and often their manager or client.
• The period. A day, a week, two weeks or half a month. Weekly is the most common shape for project work.
• Entries. Each row ties a block of hours to a date and to what the hours were for: a client, a project, a task, sometimes a cost code.
• Billable or not. Many timesheets flag each entry so client work is separated from internal work like admin, training or sales.
• Notes. A short line explaining what was done. This is what a client reads when they question a charge.
• Totals. Hours per day, per project and for the whole period.
• Approval. A signature, a click or a submit-and-lock step that says the numbers are final.

That last part is what makes a timesheet a timesheet. Until someone approves it, it is a draft.

There are two broad styles. An attendance timesheet records when you started and stopped working, with breaks, and is mostly about pay for hourly staff. A project timesheet records where the hours went, and is mostly about billing and budgets. Plenty of businesses use one form for both.

If you want to see the shape before reading further, there is a blank weekly timesheet template you can copy.

Timesheet vs time log vs invoice

These three get mixed up constantly, and the timecard often gets thrown in as a fourth.

	Time log	Timesheet	Invoice	Timecard
What it is	Raw record of what you did and when	Totaled hours per day and project for a period	Bill for money owed	Clock-in and clock-out times
When it is made	During the day	End of the day or period	After the timesheet is approved	At the start and end of each shift
Detail	Minutes, every switch	Rounded hours with short notes	Line items, rates, totals	Start, stop, breaks
Who reads it	Mostly you	Manager, client or payroll	Client’s accounts payable	Payroll
Editable	Freely	Until approved	No, you issue a credit or a new one	Usually only by a supervisor

A time log is the raw material. It can be messy: “10:47 to 11:10, email” is fine. A work journal is a close cousin of the log, focused on what you did and learned rather than on hours.

The timesheet is the reviewed version. It drops the noise, rounds the numbers by an agreed rule and assigns every hour somewhere.

The invoice uses only the billable part of the timesheet, multiplies hours by a rate and adds payment terms. A client always sees the invoice. They usually see the timesheet only if they ask to check the hours behind it.

Who needs a timesheet?

Not everyone. The people who do usually fall into one of these groups:

• Hourly employees. Their pay depends on hours worked, including overtime, so their employer needs a record. Record-keeping rules differ by country and state, so the exact requirements come from your employer or payroll provider.
• Contractors and freelancers billing by the hour. The timesheet is the evidence behind the invoice. If a client disputes a bill, a dated, project-level timesheet settles it faster than anything else.
• Agencies, consultancies, law and accounting firms. Billable hours are the product. Timesheets also show which clients are profitable and who is overloaded.
• Salaried staff on costed projects. Grant-funded work, fixed-fee client projects and internal chargebacks all need to know how many hours went where, even if nobody’s pay changes.
• Solo workers who want an honest picture. No one approves it, but a weekly sheet answers questions like “what am I actually earning per hour on this client?” The real hourly rate calculator is built for that question.

If none of those apply and you just want to know where your week went, you probably want a time log or a time audit, not a formal timesheet.

How does a timesheet get filled in?

There are three ways the numbers reach the sheet. They differ mostly in when the remembering happens.

From memory. You sit down on Friday and reconstruct the week. It is free and quick, and it is the least accurate. Short tasks, interruptions and context switches vanish. Long meetings get rounded up and scattered work gets dropped.

From timers. You start a timer when you begin a task and stop it when you finish. The numbers are good when you remember to press the button and wrong in both directions when you do not: a forgotten stop runs through lunch, a forgotten start loses an hour.

From an automatic record. Software notes what was on your screen or which apps and documents you used, and you assign that record to projects afterward. Capture needs no discipline. The work moves to the review step, where you decide which blocks belong to which client.

All three end the same way. A person looks at the numbers, fixes them and submits them. No method removes that step, and none should, because the person submitting is vouching that the hours are true.

Rounding

Most timesheets round. Common conventions are the nearest quarter hour or six-minute increments (a tenth of an hour), which are popular in legal and consulting work. Whatever rule you use, agree on it with the client or employer, write it down and apply it the same way every time. Rounding every entry up is a fast way to lose a client’s trust.

The capture-then-commit method, step by step

This method works whether you use paper, a spreadsheet or an app. The idea is to separate capturing what happened from committing to numbers.

1. Capture all day, without judgment. Keep a time log as you go, or let software keep one. Do not decide what is billable yet. Start times, end times and a few words are enough.
2. Close the day in five minutes. Before you stop work, read the log and fill gaps while they are fresh. Mark anything you are unsure about.
3. Sort into buckets. Assign each block to a client, project or internal category. Anything you cannot assign goes to admin rather than being quietly dropped or spread across clients.
4. Round and total. Apply your rounding rule per entry, then total by day and by project. Check that daily totals roughly match how long you were actually working.
5. Write the notes a reviewer needs. One line per entry, in the client’s language: “Homepage mockups, round 1”, not “Figma”.
6. Submit on a fixed day. Same day every period. A late timesheet is a reconstructed timesheet.

Steps 1 and 2 do most of the work. If the capture is good, the rest takes minutes.

A worked example

This is a made-up example to show the process. The person and clients are invented.

Maya is a freelance designer with two clients, Northwind and Lakeside. She bills both at the same hourly rate and rounds to the quarter hour. On Monday her time log reads, in part:

• 9:04 to 12:30, Northwind homepage mockups (3 hours 26 minutes)
• 12:30 to 13:15, lunch
• 13:15 to 14:15, email, invoices, portfolio update

When she closes the day, 3 hours 26 minutes rounds to 3.5. The email hour is internal, so it goes to admin as non-billable. By Friday her weekly timesheet looks like this:

Day	Client	Project	Hours	Billable	Note
Mon	Northwind	Homepage redesign	3.5	Yes	Mockups, round 1
Mon	Internal	Admin	1.0	No	Email, invoicing
Tue	Northwind	Homepage redesign	5.0	Yes	Mockups, round 2
Tue	Lakeside	Brand refresh	2.0	Yes	Kickoff call, moodboard
Wed	Lakeside	Brand refresh	6.0	Yes	Logo directions
Thu	Northwind	Homepage redesign	4.0	Yes	Responsive layouts
Thu	Internal	Admin	1.5	No	Proposal for new lead
Fri	Lakeside	Brand refresh	3.0	Yes	Logo revisions
Fri	Northwind	Homepage redesign	1.5	Yes	Client feedback changes

Totals: Northwind 14.0 hours, Lakeside 11.0 hours, internal 2.5 hours. That is 27.5 hours in all, 25.0 of them billable.

Now the invoices are simple. Northwind gets an invoice for 14.0 hours at her rate, and Lakeside one for 11.0 hours. Neither invoice mentions the admin hours, but Maya’s timesheet still shows them, which tells her that 2.5 hours of her week earned nothing directly. A timesheet shows that. An invoice never will.

What goes wrong with timesheets?

Most problems are habits, not tools.

• Filling it in at the end of the week. By Friday, Tuesday is a guess. Close each day instead.
• Sending the log as the timesheet. A client who receives a raw log full of “email” and “Slack” entries will ask questions. Summarize first.
• Spreading unassigned time across clients. If you cannot say which client an hour belongs to, it is admin. Padding billable hours this way is how disputes start.
• Inconsistent rounding. Rounding one client to the quarter hour and another to the half hour, or rounding only upward, makes totals hard to defend.
• Vague notes. “Work on project” helps nobody. A reviewer should recognize the work from the note.
• Ignoring non-billable time. Admin, sales and learning are real hours. Leaving them off makes your effective rate look better than it is.
• No fixed submission day. Late timesheets delay pay and invoices, and they are less accurate.

Tools that help with timesheets

A spreadsheet works fine for one person with a couple of clients. Once you need approvals, invoicing or several people, an app saves time. The details below come from a comparison of each vendor’s own documentation as checked on October 4, 2026. For a wider view, see our list of the best Mac time trackers.

Tool	What it does for this	Price
Harvest	Timers, daily and weekly timesheets, calendar-based tracking, invoicing from tracked time and expense tracking. Timesheet approvals on Enterprise.	Free: 1 seat, 2 projects. Teams: $9 seat/month billed annually, or $11 seat/month billed monthly. Enterprise: $14 seat/month billed annually, or $17.50 seat/month billed monthly. Enterprise Plus: custom pricing
Toggl (formerly Toggl Track), see Toggl for Mac	Timers, timesheets and calendar integrations. Billable rates need a paid plan; timesheet approvals are on Premium.	Free for up to 3 users. Starter: $9 per user per month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly. Premium: $16 per user per month billed annually, or $24 billed monthly. Enterprise: contact vendor
Clockify, see Clockify for Mac	Timer, timesheet, calendar and kiosk entry, plus an auto tracker in the desktop app. Invoicing and approvals on Standard and above.	Free for up to 5 users. Paid plans run from Basic at $3.99 per seat/month billed annually ($4.99 billed monthly) to the CAKE.com Bundle at $12.99 per seat/month billed annually ($15.99 billed monthly)
Timing, see Timing alternative	Mac only. Records time automatically across apps, websites and documents, with AI suggestions for time entries, billing status tracking and report rounding.	No free tier, 30-day trial. Professional: $9 per month billed annually, or $11 billed monthly. Expert: $11 per month billed annually, or $14 billed monthly. Connect: $16 per user per month billed annually, or $20 billed monthly
TMetric, see TMetric alternative	Timer and manual entries, with a timer button in 50+ web apps. Invoicing and billable rates on Professional, team timesheets on Business.	Free for up to 2 seats. Professional: $5.83 per seat/month billed annually, or $7 billed monthly. Business: $7.50 per seat/month billed annually, or $9 billed monthly. Enterprise: custom pricing
Dayflow	Mac only (macOS 14 or later). Records one frame every 10 seconds and has AI write the day into a timeline. Export a date range as Markdown to draft a timesheet yourself. No invoices or approvals.	$0, MIT licensed. Optional Pro: $20 a month

Dayflow is our product, so weigh this part with that in mind. It fits as the capture step: it keeps a record of your day without timers, which you then turn into a timesheet, as covered in building a Mac timesheet without manual entry. It does not fit as the timesheet system itself, because it has no invoicing, payroll approvals or team reports, and its AI summaries can miss or misread work, so check them before anything goes to a client.

Where Dayflow is the wrong choice

• Your team needs approved timesheets. Clockify wins: approvals and time off are on Standard and above, with kiosk clock-in for shared devices. Harvest also offers timesheet approvals on Enterprise, and Toggl on Premium.
• You invoice clients from tracked hours. Harvest wins. Invoicing from tracked time is included even on its free plan.
• You want an automatic Mac record that turns into billable entries. Timing wins. Dayflow records automatically too, but has no billing status, entry suggestions or report rounding.
• Anyone on the team uses Windows or Linux. Clockify and TMetric run on both. Dayflow runs only on macOS 14 or later.

The bottom line

A timesheet is the agreed version of your hours: dated, assigned to projects, rounded by a known rule and approved. It sits between the time log, which is raw and mostly private, and the invoice, which is the bill.

Get the capture right and the timesheet nearly writes itself. Keep a log during the day, close each day in a few minutes, sort and round consistently, and submit on a fixed day.

Pick a tool based on what has to happen after the sheet is done. If it needs approval, use something with approvals. If it becomes an invoice, use something that invoices. If you only need to know where the week went, a log and a spreadsheet may be all you need.

Frequently asked questions

What should be on a timesheet?

At minimum, a timesheet needs the person's name, the period covered, the date of each entry, the client or project, the hours and a short note on the work. Most also flag entries as billable or non-billable, show totals per day and per project, and include an approval step such as a signature or a submit button. If a client will see it, write notes they would recognize.

What is the difference between a timesheet and a timecard?

A timecard records when someone clocked in and out, including breaks, and is mainly used to calculate pay for shift or hourly work. A timesheet records where the hours went, by project, client or task, over a period such as a week. Many businesses combine the two. A freelancer billing clients needs a timesheet, while a retail worker usually only needs a timecard.

Do salaried employees have to fill out timesheets?

Sometimes. A salaried person's pay may not depend on hours, but employers still ask for timesheets to cost client projects, bill fixed-fee work, report on grant-funded time or plan capacity. Whether it is required depends on your employer and on local labor rules, which vary by country and state, so ask your manager or HR team what the sheet is used for.

How often should I fill out my timesheet?

Daily, even if you submit weekly. A few minutes at the end of each day to check and assign your hours keeps the record accurate, because details fade quickly. Waiting until the end of the week turns a timesheet into a reconstruction from memory, which tends to drop short tasks and interruptions. Submit on the same day every period so approvals and invoices are not delayed.

Is it okay to round time on a timesheet?

Yes, if the rule is agreed and applied consistently. Common conventions are rounding to the nearest quarter hour or to six-minute increments. Write the rule into your contract or team policy, round each entry the same way and avoid rounding everything upward, which inflates totals and erodes trust. Some apps, such as Timing, include report rounding so you do not have to do it by hand.

Is there a free timesheet app for Mac?

Several have free plans, according to vendor pages checked in October 2026. Harvest is free for 1 seat and 2 projects, Toggl is free for up to 3 users, Clockify for up to 5 users and TMetric for up to 2 seats. Dayflow is free and open source but produces a daily timeline rather than a formal timesheet. Timing has no free tier, only a 30-day trial.

Can Dayflow replace my company's timesheet system?

No. Dayflow has no invoicing, payroll approvals or team reports, so it cannot run a company's timesheet process. If managers need to approve hours, Clockify offers approvals on its Standard plan and above, and Harvest offers them on Enterprise. Dayflow can help an individual remember what they worked on before filling in that system, but the approved timesheet should live in the tool your employer uses.

Can a timesheet be filled in automatically?

Partly. Automatic trackers such as Timing on the Mac record which apps, websites and documents you used, and Clockify's desktop app includes an auto tracker. That removes the need to start and stop timers. Someone still has to assign the recorded time to clients or projects, check it and submit it, because the person submitting a timesheet is confirming the hours are accurate.

Is a timesheet the same as an invoice?

No. A timesheet records hours, including non-billable ones like admin. An invoice is a bill: it takes only the billable hours from an approved timesheet, multiplies them by a rate and adds payment terms. Clients receive the invoice and may ask for the timesheet behind it as evidence. Apps like Harvest can create invoices directly from tracked time, which saves copying numbers between the two.

Can I use a spreadsheet as a timesheet?

Yes. For one person with a few clients, a spreadsheet with columns for date, client, project, hours, billable and notes does the job, plus a totals row per project. It gets harder with several people, approvals or invoicing, where a dedicated app saves time. A free weekly timesheet template on the Dayflow site is a reasonable starting point if you do not want to build one.