Timesheets
Timesheets records the hours worked on a project, day by day and person by person, against the cost codes those hours belong to. It is the labour half of what the job actually cost, and it is the record that is hardest to reconstruct later, because nobody remembers on Friday who was on site on Tuesday.
The tool is built around one rule: a sheet is one submitter's account of one day. Everything else follows from that.
Two ways to submit
A project can enable either or both, and both are on until you turn one off.
Crew
A foreman filling in their whole gang in one go: a row per person, hours across, a cost code, submit. It is the fast path and the one most sites use.
Self-report
One person entering their own hours. Anybody who can create a timesheet but cannot manage the tool is structurally held to this: they may only log themselves, and a line naming somebody else is refused rather than quietly dropped. That is what makes self-report safe to hand out widely.
Who goes on a line
Each line names one person, and the person can come from three places.
Inducted workers, team members and ad-hoc names
Inducted workers come from Inductions, and on most sites they are nearly all of it. Team members are people with a Teralo account on the project. Ad-hoc is a name typed in for somebody who is on neither list.
Ad-hoc names are remembered for your organisation, so the same casual labourer on two of your sites is one name rather than two spellings. In the picker, everybody is grouped under the company they work for.
The name on a line is frozen when it is written. If somebody is later renamed, or their record is deleted, the sheet still says who was there that day, which is the entire point of keeping it.
Hours and cost codes
Hours are entered in hours and stored to the minute, so 7.5 is seven and a half.
Standard, overtime, weekend and shutdown
Each line can carry an hours type, one of those four, which is how a Saturday or a shutdown week is told apart from an ordinary day at the point it is recorded rather than afterwards.
Cost codes
Each line can also carry a cost code, written in the same code-type form the rest of Teralo uses, for example 04.00-LAB. The sheet has a default cost code that pre-fills every line, and a line can override it, which is what lets one crew's day be split between two codes.
There is a Set all row on a crew sheet for the common case: eight hours to everybody, one cost code to everybody, then fix the three exceptions.
Because the codes are the same ones direct costs use, labour and materials land on the same lines of the budget.
Nobody is counted twice
A person cannot appear on two submitted timesheets for the same project on the same day. The check runs when a sheet is submitted, names the person, and refuses the submission.
That is the rule the whole tool exists to protect, and it is why a foreman's crew sheet and a worker's own sheet for the same day cannot both stand. It is checked at submission rather than while you are drafting, so a draft can sit half-finished without getting in anybody's way.
The week view
The register view is one row per sheet. The week view is the other shape: a Monday-anchored grid of people down the side and seven days across, for filling in a whole week in one sitting.
Two things about it are worth knowing. It writes drafts only, so nothing is submitted from the week grid, and it edits your own sheets. And a day it cannot represent is left alone: a day where somebody appears on more than one line, or where any line carries a note, is marked and locked in that view, because a grid with one box per person per day cannot round-trip it. Open that day itself.
Submitting, approving and locking
- Draft, being filled in
- Submitted, waiting on a reviewer
- Approved, agreed, and the sheet is locked
- Rejected, sent back with a comment
Only the author of a sheet can submit it, unless you manage the tool. Approval locks the sheet, which is the point of approving hours: after that only a manager can touch it.
Reopening an approved sheet
A manager can reopen an approved sheet, which puts it back to draft and notifies whoever submitted it. It is available only once the review has finished, so a sheet still going through its approval cannot be pulled out from underneath it.
Anybody involved can leave a comment on a sheet, and the submitter is notified. Sheets waiting on you appear in My Items.
Who signed in that day
Opening a sheet shows the workers who signed in at the gate on that date, from Inductions, with their sign-in and sign-out times.
It is a prompt and a cross-check rather than a rule: nothing is filled in for you and nothing is refused because it disagrees. It is simply the fastest way to notice that the sheet says nine people and the gate says eleven, on the day it still matters rather than at the end of the month.
SettingsHost only
Project, then Tools, then Timesheets holds three things.
The standard day, in minutes, which pre-fills a new line. It is eight hours unless you change it.
A default cost code for the project, which pre-fills every sheet and every line, and is overridable at both.
Which submission modes are enabled, crew and self-report, either or both.
The workflow binding is set at organisation level with an optional per-project override, and the organisation can lock it so projects cannot change it.
PermissionsHost only
- Can view timesheets shows the tool
- Can create and submit timesheets allows making one, and without the manage permission restricts you to your own hours
- Can manage and approve timesheets is the reviewer and administrator
- Can permanently delete timesheets is separate and is not implied by managing
See How permissions work.
WorkflowsHost only
Submitting a sheet starts its workflow, and a sheet cannot be submitted until one is bound. That is deliberate and it is worth understanding, because it replaced something worse: an unbound timesheet tool used to approve and lock hours on submission, with no review and no notification, simply because nothing had been configured.
The default graph notifies everybody holding the manage permission and the first of them to respond decides it. Approve locks the sheet. Reject requires a comment and sends it back to the author to revise and resubmit, which returns it to submitted and notifies the managers again.
If a project genuinely does not review labour hours, bind the auto-approve template that ships alongside the default. It approves and locks on submission, which is the same outcome as having nothing bound used to produce, with the difference that somebody chose it on purpose.
Build variations in the workflow builder and attach them as described in Binding a workflow to a tool.