What a timesheet records
Each row is a day (or a block within a day) and each entry carries start time, end time or duration, and an allocation: the client site a guard covered, the project an engineer worked on, the job card a technician closed. Weekly timesheets suit consultancies and IT services; monthly timesheets suit contract labour, security and facility management where the client is billed per month. Totals per allocation are what billing and costing consume.
A timesheet can be filled manually by the employee, generated from punch-in/punch-out events with the allocation added afterwards, or pre-filled from the roster and corrected by exception. The third method is the least work for shift-based workforces. The monthly timesheet template shows a standard layout; the timesheet calculator totals hours across a week.
Timesheet vs attendance
Attendance answers 'was the employee at work, and for how many hours'. A timesheet answers 'what were those hours for, and who pays for them'. A guard present 12 hours is one attendance record; the same 12 hours on a timesheet might be 8 at Client A and 4 at Client B after a redeployment, billed separately. Keeping the two apart matters because attendance is a statutory record and a timesheet is a commercial one.
For most Indian SMEs attendance is enough for payroll. Timesheets become necessary when hours are billed to clients (man-hours in security and FM), when projects need costing, or when overtime is paid per task. The article on timesheet vs attendance goes deeper into which one you need.
- Attendance: presence and hours per day; statutory; feeds paid days and LOP
- Timesheet: hours per task/client/site; commercial; feeds billing, costing and OT
- Both should derive from the same punch events so totals reconcile
Approval, billing and payroll use
A timesheet must be approved before it is billed or paid: the employee submits, the manager checks against the roster or job cards, and the approved version locks. Disputes with clients almost always trace back to unapproved or edited timesheets, so keep a version history. For contract staffing, the client's site in-charge often countersigns – a step that stops billing arguments at month end.
On the payroll side, approved hours convert into regular pay and OT. A common error is paying OT from the timesheet while the attendance register shows fewer hours; the two must agree or one of them is wrong. The guides on converting timesheets into payroll and calculating overtime from timesheets show the reconciliation.
A multi-skilled technician works Mon–Sat, 09:00–18:00 with a 1-hour break (8 paid hours). His weekly timesheet shows 6 days × 8 h = 48 h, allocated 30 h to Client X (AMC contract), 14 h to Client Y (call-out billing at ₹450/h) and 4 h to the workshop. Billing invoices Client Y ₹6,300 for the week; payroll pays 48 regular hours with no OT because the weekly cap of 48 was not exceeded.
Attend Mitra derives hours from verified punches against shift templates and produces site-wise man-hour exports that agencies use as the approved timesheet for client billing, alongside the statutory attendance register generated from the same records.