When hours become an invoice, someone needs to check first. That's what timesheet approval is for: each person closes their own period, the approver checks it, and what's approved becomes a stable number — not something that keeps changing after the invoice went out.
Approval is part of the Enterprise plan, and it's optional: without it, everyone tracks their hours and the reports already tell the story.
Weekly or monthly
Under Workspace › Hour approval you choose the Approval period: weekly or monthly. Changing it later is safe — each submitted period keeps its own dates, so history doesn't change meaning when the rule changes.
Submitting your period
Under My time › Week, review the grid and click Submit for approval. Everyone submits their own timesheet, including admins and the account owner — nobody submits someone else's work.
A notice at the top shows the period's state:
Draft — open, accepting entries and edits.
Awaiting approval — submitted. You can't edit any more; to fix something, ask for a rejection.
Changes requested — rejected, with the reason written out. Fix it and submit again.
Approved — closed and frozen.
Submitted is not the same as approved: submitting closes the period for you, but the approver can still correct what they're about to accept.
The approver's queue
Whoever has approval permission sees the Approvals item in the menu. The queue shows person, period, total hours (with how much is billable) and submission date — the numbers are right there on the list, so nobody has to open one item at a time just to learn the size of what they're deciding on.
In Details, you see the breakdown by project, with the customer alongside and each one's hours. That's the check that matters in practice: does it match what was contracted? Did the right project get the hours? It's not a line-by-line read of descriptions — the detailed report exists for that.
Approving
When you click Approve, the confirmation names whose timesheet it is, how many hours it has and what the date range is. Once approved, the period is frozen for everyone — including for whoever approved it. And the hours' amounts are frozen with it: a later rate recalculation doesn't touch an approved period, and it tells you how many entries were skipped for that reason.
Approving your own timesheet is allowed — otherwise the account owner could never close their own week, since there's nobody above them. The record keeps who approved what.
Rejecting
Reject requires a reason, and it goes by email to whoever submitted. That text is how the person will know what to fix — "Tuesday's entries have no description" resolves it; "rejected" produces a chat conversation and a second submission identical to the first.
Reopening
An approved period accepts edits again when the approver reopens it. That's the right path when a legitimate hour from that period turns up — including an hour stuck in the sync queue because it was tracked offline.
Backdated entries
By default, the system blocks logging hours into an approved period, and it explains why instead of throwing a permission error: your role allows it, what stops you is the period's state.
If your operation prefers the opposite, turn off Block entries in approved periods under Workspace. In that mode the hour is accepted, the period goes back to "awaiting approval" and whoever had approved it is notified. Never silently — an approved period's total has to keep matching what was approved.
Where to go next
The weekly timesheet — where the period is submitted from.
When the internet drops — hours stuck because of a closed period.
Reports — the approval status filter.
Workspace settings — weekly or monthly period and the backdating rule.
In short: each person submits their own period from the Week tab; the approver checks the queue, with totals and a per-project breakdown, and approves or rejects with a reason; approving freezes hours and amounts for everyone until someone reopens; and backdated entries into approved periods are blocked by default, or accepted by sending the period back for approval.