How to Streamline the Time Sheet Approval Process

Automate Your Timesheet Approval Process for Efficiency and Accuracy

Employees and contractors often submit their timesheets via email, fax, software, and various other channels, confusing the HR team and the approvers. Employees usually do not know if their timesheet was reviewed and approved. The approving manager must evaluate and then forward the request to the HR group.

One-off emails are insufficient for approval documentation, and paper employee timesheets are often lost or illegible. This manual effort puts a significant strain on the HR team’s time. The employee submitting the request cannot efficiently determine the current status or receive notice of approval. The process is slow, inefficient, prone to mistakes, and hard to track. Also, a manual or paper-based process makes auditing difficult. It is challenging to determine who received what, when, who approved it, and whether the information was accurate.

How to Automate the Time Sheet Approval Process

A great way to accelerate this process is to automate it using Nutrient Workflow. Nutrient Workflow has prebuilt processes in our system that can be downloaded and used in your own Nutrient Workflow Instance. This process applies to hourly employees who submit their time sheets for approval to their manager. When the employee starts the request, their name, department, and manager will auto-fill; they must enter their time. The time sheet portion of the form is a pre-built grid with calculations already in place. It’ll take hours worked from start to finish and subtract any break times - leaving you and your employee the final sum total of hours worked per week.

This process, like any Nutrient Workflow process, can be started and saved as a draft. That way, employees can log their time as the week goes on and keep track without having to fill everything out at the end of the week.

Afterward, it’ll route to the manager for approval or rework, notify the employee of their manager’s choice, and be sent to payroll for processing. Nutrient Workflow allows this data to feed directly into your payroll system using the API task laid out in the process below.

Process

Form