An employee timesheet is a friendly way of tracking and recording the amount of time an employee spends working. It reports the total amount of time worked on a specific task or project making it easy to use it in payroll. Though initially they were developed for the payment, today they are used in different other ways like recording start and finish of certain tasks that is used in project costing, tracking management, job estimation and client billing. It allows the company to track accurately and pay for the hours worked according to the labor law.
Creating an employee timesheet
- Define the labels you require – Figure out the appropriate names that you need on the timesheets. All labels should be in bold to stand out from the rest of the information. Required labels include:
- Name, Social Security Number, Employee Identification number, Department, Manager: All these are used to identify the employee. For record purposes, even if the company has numbers to determine different employees, insist on the use of names on the worksheet.
- A period, Days of the week, Time in and out, Breaks, Sick offs, Vacation: Use columns for breaking up the days – These separates the morning working hours from afternoon working hours to able to account for the time taken for lunch. Every day should show both the morning and the evening part for easy accounting.
- Date: Automate your dates – Requiring every employee to enter manually the date leads to many mistakes even for the best-trained user. The simplest solution rectifies this error is to automate dates by having the user enter the first part of the time; the rest will automatically appear correctly.
- Overtime, Subtotals, Grand totals: Calculate the day's working hours – You add up the total hours worked both daily. Using the simple formulas for an excel sheet add all the hours to get the total. Calculate the total hours for the week by adding up the total daily hours.
- Employee signature lines: Most employees may not sign an official signature but may write their name on this line to show that they are the ones who edited their timesheet. Ensure that once an employee enters data, the cells automatically locks to prevent editing and unwanted changes. Cell locking protects the cells from being accidentally deleted or deleting your formula.
- Manager signature line – Once you have calculated all the daily and weekly hours lock that timesheet to protect it from loss or editing or deleting. Use a password and ensure you remember it when needed – the secret is to use a simple password that is identical for all the employees' sheet.