Timesheets

The Timesheets screen is where you track and approve your team’s hours week by week. It shows a grid of everyone’s hours for the selected week, lets you correct entries, review the time corrections your employees request, and approve weeks for payroll — one at a time or several at once. This guide walks through reading the grid, moving between weeks, how hours are calculated, reviewing corrections, approving, and the weekly-hours PDF.

The week at a glance

The top of the screen summarises the selected week:

Total hours — the combined hours across every employee for the week.
Employees — how many people have hours or are active this week.
Approved weeks — how many employees’ weeks you’ve already approved.

Use the Previous week and Next week buttons to move between weeks; the grid and the totals update to the week you choose.

The hours grid

The main grid has one row per employee and one column per day of the week. Each cell shows the hours worked that day, with a running total for each employee on the right and a daily total for each column along the bottom. All numbers line up in a fixed-width font so columns are easy to scan.

Each employee’s row also shows whether their week is Approved or Pending, shown as a labelled badge so it reads the same whether or not you can tell the colors apart.

How hours are calculated

QELM calculates each entry’s hours for you, on the server — you never have to do the math, and the grid always shows the final, calculated result:

Lunch deductions — for employees who aren’t exempt, an automatic one-hour lunch is deducted from any shift of six hours or more. Employees marked lunch-exempt keep their full hours.
Clock validation — a clock-out time must come after the clock-in time. If they’re out of order, the entry is rejected so a bad span can’t slip into payroll.

These calculated hours feed both payroll (gross pay) and job profitability, so the grid, the weekly PDF, and payroll all show the same numbers. The screen never re-does this math on its own — it shows exactly what the server worked out.

Clocking in and out

Employees can clock in when they start on a job and clock out when they finish; QELM records the times and works out the hours.

Picking where you are. When clocking in, you choose the job or the site you are working on. The field suggests as you type: your own open jobs first, then addresses matched as you type them, so a crew member at a site that is not one of their jobs can still record where they are rather than leaving it blank.

Starting a shift for someone else. A supervisor can clock someone in — for the crew member whose phone is dead, or who is already up a ladder. It is recorded as the supervisor having done it, so the timesheet never claims the employee clocked themselves in.

Who is on the clock. The screen shows an on-clock roster — Clocked in now — listing everyone currently on the clock, the job they are on, and how long they have been on it. A shift running past sixteen hours is flagged as a probable missed clock-out, so it gets fixed rather than paid. A supervisor can correct an active shift’s start time from here, and a reason is required — it goes on the record with the supervisor’s name.

Entering and correcting time

You can add or adjust time for an employee directly. When you enter a clock-in and a clock-out, QELM computes the hours — applying the lunch deduction and the clock-out check described above — and records the result. The job is optional, so general (unassigned) time is allowed.

Reviewing time corrections

When an employee asks to change one of their entries, it appears here as a time correction to review. Each one shows the original time next to the proposed time, side by side, with the employee’s reason. Choose Approve to apply the proposed change (QELM re-checks the lunch/clock math) or Reject to keep the original. Rejecting asks you to confirm first — “Reject this time correction?” — since it discards the employee’s request.

Approving weeks

Once a week’s hours look right, approve it so it’s locked for payroll. You can approve employees’ weeks individually, or select several at once: tick the checkbox on each row (or the select-all checkbox in the header), and a bar appears with an “Approve N weeks” action. Approving in bulk locks all the selected weeks together. Approving the wrong week affects pay, so the action is deliberate — already-approved weeks can’t be re-selected.

Approving is reversible

An approval is a lock, not a one-way door. Reopen week unlocks an employee’s week so it can be corrected, and weeks can be reopened in bulk the same way they are approved. While a week is locked, edits to it are refused — that is the point of the lock — so reopening is the first step of any correction to an approved week.

What cannot be changed is a committed payroll run. Once the week’s hours have been paid out, that payroll is history. Reopen and correct before payroll goes out, not after.

The weekly-hours PDF

Weekly hours PDF is a download button in the header of the screen. It saves a printable summary of the selected week’s hours by employee — the per-day breakdown with the lunch deductions shown — as a PDF file, handy for payroll records or sharing.

The button only appears if you hold the time approval permission. The download itself is guarded on the server by the same permission, so it is not a cosmetic hiding: without time approval there is no weekly PDF to be had. If you cannot see the button and you need the file, ask an Admin to grant you time approval on the permissions matrix — see People & Access.

A note on what you see

The Timesheets screen shows only your own workspace’s employees and hours, and the figures reflect what your team has clocked or entered. If the grid looks empty, it usually just means no time has been recorded for that week yet — use the week navigation to find another week. For how these hours flow into pay, see the Guides overview.