Timesheet best practices

Inaccurate timesheets are the single most common source of wage-and-hour lawsuits in the US. The Department of Labor recovered over $200 million in back wages in a recent year, mostly from off-the-clock work and miscalculated overtime. From the employer side, even well-intentioned errors can compound into five- or six-figure settlements.

For workers, sloppy timesheets mean lost income — often invisibly. A study by the Economic Policy Institute estimated US workers lose about $15 billion per year to wage theft, much of it from rounding policies that always favor the employer.

• Punch in close to your actual start. If you arrive at 7:54 AM and your shift starts at 8:00 AM, punching in immediately is fine — under standard rounding rules it'll round to 8:00. Don't wait until 8:05 "to be safe"; you're working for free.
• Punch out before any unpaid break. If you take a 30-minute lunch, punch out at the start and back in at the end. Don't let the system auto-deduct — auto-deductions get challenged in court constantly.
• Note exceptions immediately. Forgot to punch back from lunch? Worked through a break because of a customer? Write it down the same day in the notes field or email your supervisor. Memory degrades fast.
• Review before submitting. Walk through the week before signing. The five seconds you spend now save days of payroll correction later.

Most fraud isn't malicious — it's drift. But it costs employers an estimated 2–7% of gross payroll. Watch for these patterns:

• Buddy punching — one employee clocks in another. Solved with biometric or photo-verification kiosks.
• Time inflation — adding 10–15 minutes per shift "for travel" or "setup" that wasn't authorized. Catch by comparing punches to access-badge logs or schedule.
• Phantom breaks — recording a 30-minute lunch on the timesheet that didn't happen. Common when meal-break premiums are owed for missed lunches; this dodges the premium.
• Unauthorized overtime — staying late without approval to pad the paycheck. Solution is a hard rule: OT requires pre-approval, but you still pay for it once worked (FLSA requires you to).

Run this checklist every Friday (or whatever your pay-period close is):

• All days have a punch in AND a punch out — no missing entries.
• Shifts that look too long (12h+) or too short (under 4h) are intentional.
• Lunch breaks deducted match what actually happened.
• Overtime is flagged and approved by the supervisor.
• Daily and weekly totals match expectations within ±1 hour.
• Time-off (PTO, sick, holiday) is coded correctly, not just blank cells.
• Employee has signed off (electronic or paper).

The Weekly Timesheet in this calculator exports a CSV with date, day, start, end, break, and decimal hours per day, plus totals. Most major payroll providers accept this format with minimal mapping:

• ADP RUN — use the "Time Import" utility. Map our "Hours" column to "Regular Hours" and the OT line item to "Overtime Hours". Employee ID needs to be added manually.
• Gusto — under "Run Payroll → Add Hours", paste the totals row. Gusto handles OT calculation itself if you import total hours and pick the FLSA setting.
• QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) — import via "Time Entry → Import CSV". Make sure date format is YYYY-MM-DD, which is what our export uses.
• Paychex Flex — copy decimal hours into the weekly grid; Paychex doesn't have a one-click CSV importer for small accounts.

FLSA requires employers to keep payroll and timekeeping records for at least 3 years. Some states require 4 or 6. Workers should keep personal copies (a phone photo of the weekly export is fine) for at least 2 years — long enough to back up a wage claim.

If your employer uses a SaaS time-tracking tool, export your records before leaving the job. Access tends to disappear within days of the last paycheck.