Time and expenses · 4 min read
Late timecards and piled-up expense reports distort budgets, invoices and reports. How to set up a weekly entry and approval cycle that people actually stick to.
In services firms, hours worked are the raw material of almost every number: budget consumption, time-and-materials billing, utilization, project profitability. If hours arrive late, all of these numbers arrive late with them, and decisions are made on stale information.
Delay also erodes quality. Someone who fills in the week on Friday remembers fairly precisely what they worked on; someone reconstructing it at the end of the month tends to spread the hours roughly, often onto the biggest project or the one they remember best. A weekly cadence is not a formality: it is what makes the data reliable.
The most effective flow is also the simplest. Everyone enters hours and expenses during the week and submits them by a fixed deadline, say Friday afternoon. The project manager approves or rejects the entries for their project by the following Monday, and finance finds the data ready for invoicing and control.
Two details make the difference. First, a rejection must always come with a reason, otherwise the person does not know what to fix and the cycle drags on. Second, approvals must be possible in bulk, because someone approving dozens of lines a week cannot open them one by one.
Finally, it is worth deciding who approves when the project manager is away. A week of vacation should not hold up an entire team’s hours.
Even with the best process, mistakes happen: hours booked to the wrong project, a duplicated expense, an activity that needs reclassifying as non-billable. The temptation is to correct the figure directly, perhaps in the finance team, without telling anyone.
It is a temptation to resist. A silent correction changes a project’s numbers without the project manager knowing, and makes it impossible later to understand why the budget changed. It is better to handle corrections as explicit adjustments: an entry stating what changes, by how much and why, subject to the same approval as ordinary hours.
Adjustments also cover items that fit no standard category, such as a true-up agreed with the customer or a one-off cost. Recording them as approved miscellaneous entries keeps the picture complete without forcing the categories.
Silent correction
Approved adjustment
Expense reports cause more friction than hours, because they involve money people have paid out of their own pockets. Much of the argument comes from unclear rules: which expenses are reimbursable, within what limits, which can be billed back to the customer and which the company absorbs.
It pays to write these rules down in a short, readable policy and to link every expense to a project from the moment it is entered. The project manager then sees straight away how much expenses weigh on the budget, and costs that can be billed back are not forgotten on the invoice. Asking for the receipt at entry, rather than at month end, avoids frantic searches for lost receipts.
A clear expense policy
The cycle closes when approved hours and expenses become revenue. In time-and-materials projects, the entries approved in the period generate billing events; in fixed-price projects, they feed budget consumption and profitability analysis. Either way, only what has been approved should make it into the numbers.
In Sales, hours, expenses and miscellaneous entries follow the same submission and approval flow, and whatever is approved updates the project portfolio and the dashboard, where submitted and approved hours are visible at a glance. The result that really counts, though, is cultural: when people see that their hours are genuinely used to make decisions, punctuality stops being an imposition and becomes a habit.
Keep reading
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