An approver joins the timesheet submission process at exactly one point: after a consultant has submitted, before anything gets billed. That single decision, approve or reject, is what turns a consultant's word for it into a record a client invoice can safely rest on. This guide covers what an approver sees, what to check, and exactly what happens once the decision is made.
The stages a timesheet moves through
Every timesheet sits in one of four statuses: Draft, Submitted, Approved or Rejected. A consultant builds a timesheet in Draft, where it can be freely edited. Submitting locks it and moves it to Submitted, which is the only status an approver can act on. From there it becomes either Approved, and eligible to appear on a client invoice, or Rejected, and back with the consultant.
Those four statuses are the whole model. There is no in-between state for "partly reviewed" or "waiting on someone else". A timesheet is either still being drafted, waiting for a decision, decided in the consultant's favour, or decided against it.
What an approver can see, and what stays hidden
An approver only ever sees timesheets that carry at least one entry against a project they are set up to approve. That rule applies both to the queue and to opening a single timesheet directly, so a link to somebody else's timesheet on a project you do not approve will not resolve.
What the review screen shows is hours, dates, project names, descriptions, whether the time is billable, and the names of the consultant and any other approver decisions already recorded. What it does not show, ever, is a rate or an amount. Nothing money-shaped travels to the approver's screen at all, which is why a client-side approver can review a week's work in full without seeing what it costs or what it will be billed at.
Deciding: approve or reject
Approve and reject sit side by side, but they are not built to feel equally easy. Approve is the solid, filled button, and it acts the moment you click it. Reject is the quieter option, and it stays disabled until you have typed a reason. Once you have, a confirmation step echoes the reason back to you before the rejection goes through, so a rejection can never fire on an empty or accidental click.
Both actions are also available from the approval queue itself, not only from the full review screen. Approving a routine, expected week can be done from the row directly; rejecting from the row opens the same reason field in place, right there in the list. What is not available is a way to select several timesheets and act on them together: there is no bulk approve and no selection checkbox, so each timesheet gets its own decision, even when five identical weekly timesheets land in the queue on the same day.
A decision is only ever offered where one can actually be taken. Timesheets that are already Draft, Approved or Rejected show up beside the Submitted ones in the queue for context, but they carry no approve or reject control, because there is nothing left to decide.
What happens after the decision
Approving a timesheet moves it straight to Approved. The entries themselves do not change: the hours, dates, projects and descriptions on an approved timesheet are exactly what the consultant submitted. From Approved, the timesheet becomes available to include on a client invoice.
Rejecting moves the timesheet to Rejected, with the reason attached and the hours left exactly as they were. It does not return to Draft on its own. A rejected timesheet is viewable, and the consultant can read the reason on it straight away, but it is not directly editable in that state. The consultant has to take a separate action, Reopen, which is what moves it back into Draft. Only once it is back in Draft can they change anything and resubmit it.
That two-step handback exists because Draft and Rejected carry different controls for a reason: Draft rows carry Edit and Submit, Rejected rows carry Reopen. A rejected timesheet sitting untouched, with its reason attached, is a record of what was wrong and why. It only becomes something the consultant can rewrite once they have deliberately reopened it.
Ownership backs this up on the write side, too. The only person who may write to a timesheet, at all, is the person who filed it, and that rule is checked with no exception for role across every mutation that touches it, from editing a single entry through to Submit and Reopen itself. An approver cannot submit, edit or reopen a timesheet on somebody else's behalf, however senior they are. The one exception is an admin who filed a timesheet on a consultant's behalf in the first place, since the resulting record belongs to whoever created it.
An admin does have one further route past all of this: an override that can force a timesheet to Approved or Rejected directly, bypassing the normal decision. It always requires a written reason of its own, and that reason, along with who used it and when, is stored on the timesheet and written to the audit log. It exists for the cases the ordinary route cannot reach, such as an approver who has since left, not as a shortcut around a working queue.
From an approved timesheet to an invoice
Approval is not the end of the line, it is what makes the next step possible. An invoice is generated from a set of approved timesheets, and only from approved ones. A timesheet still sitting in Submitted, however uncontroversial, cannot be pulled onto an invoice until it has actually been approved. That link between the two is deliberate: it means every hour a client is billed for has already passed through someone who could vouch for it.
The detail of how those approved hours turn into a finished invoice, tax lines, a purchase order number and all, is covered on the invoicing page.
What good approving looks like
Approving quickly matters as much as approving carefully, since a timesheet sitting unreviewed in a queue is a week of billable hours going nowhere. A few habits keep both true at once.
Check the same four things every time: that the work happened, that the hours look plausible against what you know of the week, that they sit on the right project, and that the description would survive a client reading it. Anything that fails one of those is worth a specific rejection reason rather than a vague one, since a reason naming the exact row saves a second round trip.
Use the row-level actions for the timesheets you can vouch for without opening the full detail, and save the full review screen for anything that needs a closer look. And treat the queue as something to clear on a schedule rather than something to get to eventually. A consultancy invoicing on a fixed date needs approvals to land before that date, not after it.
More on setting up who approves what, and how projects and approvers connect, is on the approval workflows page. The submission side of this same process, written for the person filling the timesheet in rather than the person deciding on it, is in the guide to getting a timesheet approved first time.
Common questions about the timesheet submission process
Does rejecting a timesheet send it straight back to Draft?
No. Rejecting moves a timesheet to Rejected, with the reason attached and the hours untouched. It stays in Rejected, viewable but not directly editable, until the consultant uses the Reopen action. Reopen is what moves it into Draft, and only from Draft can they edit and resubmit it.
Can an approver edit the entries on a timesheet they're reviewing?
No. Only the person who filed the timesheet can write to it, including editing entries, submitting, or reopening it. An approver's role is to approve or reject, with a reason where the timesheet is rejected. The one exception is an admin who filed the timesheet on a consultant's behalf, since that record belongs to whoever created it.
What can an approver see on a timesheet, and what is hidden?
An approver sees hours, dates, project names, descriptions, whether time is billable, and the names attached to the timesheet and any earlier decisions on it. Rates and amounts never appear on the approver's screen, so a client-side approver can review a week's work without seeing what it costs.
Can several timesheets be approved at once?
No. There is no bulk approve and no way to select more than one timesheet at a time. Each one is approved or rejected on its own, though a routine timesheet can be approved directly from the queue row without opening the full review screen.
What happens once a timesheet is approved?
It becomes eligible to be included on a client invoice. Nothing on the timesheet itself changes when it is approved: the hours, projects and descriptions stay exactly as submitted. A timesheet still waiting for a decision cannot be added to an invoice until it has actually been approved.
Can an admin override an approver's decision?
Yes. An admin can force a timesheet to Approved or Rejected directly, but only with a written reason, and that reason, along with who made the override and when, is recorded on the timesheet and in the audit log. It is designed for cases the normal approval route cannot reach, not as a routine substitute for it.
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