Most small consultancies do not shop for timesheet submission software until a spreadsheet has already failed them: a rejected invoice with no record of who approved the hours behind it, a consultant who filed the wrong week and nobody noticed until the client queried it, or a review process that lives entirely in someone's memory of who is meant to check what. By the time you are looking, the requirements are usually clear in outline and vague in the detail that actually matters.
This guide sets out what to evaluate, in order: how hours get captured, how approval and rejection actually work, what an audit trail needs to cover, how invoicing should connect to approved hours, and how pricing is shaped once you go looking for a real quote rather than a marketing page.
What timesheet submission software actually needs to do
Strip away the feature lists and a consultancy buying timesheet submission software is really asking five questions of any candidate.
Can a consultant record hours against a project without friction, on a laptop and on a phone. Can someone who did not do the work check it before it becomes billable, with enough context to make a real decision rather than a rubber stamp. Is there a record of who decided what, and when, that would survive being read back to a client. Does an approved hour actually turn into an invoice line without someone retyping it. And does the pricing scale in a way that matches how the practice actually grows, in headcount rather than in some other unit nobody asked for.
Everything below is one of those five questions, unpacked into what to actually check during a trial or a demo rather than what to take on trust from a features page.
How hours get captured: real time or end-of-week reconstruction
Some tools ask a consultant to log hours as they happen, project by project, task by task. Others assume a Friday-afternoon reconstruction of a whole week and are built around that instead. Neither is wrong on its own, but the software should match how your consultants actually work, because a tool built for real-time logging feels like unnecessary ceremony to someone reconstructing a week from memory, and a tool built purely for weekly recall makes daily logging clumsy for anyone who prefers it.
What is worth checking directly, in a trial rather than a sales call:
- Whether a week's hours are entered as one grid, project and task down the side and days across the top, or as a list of individual entries that each need their own date. A grid built around a full week is faster to fill in and faster to scan for a gap than a list, once there is more than a day or two of entries in it.
- Whether the tool distinguishes an empty day from a day genuinely logged at zero hours. This sounds trivial until a consultant works no hours on a project on a public holiday and the record needs to say that plainly, not blank it out because zero looked the same as nothing entered.
- Whether repeat weeks can be built from the last one, rather than rebuilt from scratch, for the very common case of a consultant on the same two or three projects every week.
- Whether weekly and monthly periods are both genuinely supported, since a monthly retainer and a weekly time-and-materials engagement do not fit the same reporting period.
TimeSubmit's time tracking is built as a week grid: one row per project, task and billable flag, seven day columns across it, with weekly and monthly periods both supported and a genuine distinction between an empty cell and an entered zero. A consultant can copy the shape of last week's entries into the current one without carrying last week's hours across, which covers the identical-weekly-retainer case without inventing hours that have not actually been logged yet.
How approval and rejection actually works
This is the part of a demo that gets glossed over fastest, and it is the part that determines whether approvers actually keep up with the queue.
Ask, specifically, who can see what. A tool where every approver sees every timesheet in the organisation is a tool that will eventually put a client's approver in front of another client's hours, which is not a small mistake to make once. The safer model scopes an approver to the projects they are actually assigned to approve, and enforces that scope on every read, not only on the list view.
Ask what a rejection actually requires. A reject button with no required reason produces a timesheet bounced back with nothing telling the consultant what to fix, which just produces a second submission with the same problem. A reject that requires a typed reason, and confirms it back before it goes through, produces a correction the first time.
Ask what happens when the named approver cannot act: on leave, no longer with the client, or a project whose approver was never properly assigned. A tool with no answer to this leaves a timesheet stuck indefinitely. The better answer is a defined override, available to an administrator, that requires a written reason and leaves a record of who used it and when, rather than a silent workaround.
And ask whether the tool supports more than one approver on a project at all, and if so, whether it forces every approver to act independently or allows an order, so a project with several sign-offs is not just several separate races to the same button.
TimeSubmit's approval workflows scope every approver to the projects they are actually set up to approve, on the queue and on the individual review screen alike. Rejecting requires a typed reason and a confirmation step that echoes it back before it submits. An administrator can force-approve or force-reject any timesheet through an admin override, but only with a written reason attached to the record, which exists for the cases the normal route cannot reach rather than as a shortcut around it. On the Margin and Enterprise plans, a consultancy can additionally turn on sequential approval for a project, so several named approvers act in a defined order rather than independently, and an approver who cannot act, because their record is inactive or their role has changed, is skipped automatically rather than holding up everyone after them. There is deliberately no bulk approve or selection checkbox across any plan: every timesheet gets its own decision. The mechanics of both sides of this, what a consultant sees and what an approver checks, are covered in more depth in the timesheet submission process, an approver's guide and in the five stages a timesheet approval workflow actually needs.
Audit trail and compliance: what to actually check
An audit trail is worth almost nothing if it only shows the current status of a record. What it needs to show is the history: who submitted, who reviewed, who overrode, and what reason each of those actions carried, in a form that would still make sense read back to a client eighteen months later.
Specifically worth asking a vendor:
- Does an admin override get recorded with who used it, when, and why, on the record itself, not only in a log an administrator would have to go digging for.
- Does the approval history stay visible once a timesheet has moved on to Approved, or does it disappear the moment a decision is made. A history that vanishes on approval is a history that cannot answer the one question most likely to come up later, which is who actually signed this off.
- Is an audit log a feature of every plan or only some of them. It is a reasonable thing for a vendor to gate behind a higher plan, but it needs to be stated plainly rather than discovered after signing up.
TimeSubmit stores who used an admin override, when, and the reason given, directly on the timesheet, and the approval decision history stays visible at every status the timesheet reaches afterwards rather than disappearing once it is approved. Sequential approval changes, such as turning the feature on for a project or reordering approvers, are written to a dedicated audit log on the plans that carry one, Margin and Enterprise.
Where invoicing fits, and what integration should mean
"Integrates with invoicing" means very different things depending on the vendor, and it is worth being precise about which one you are actually buying.
At one end, integration means an export a bookkeeper manually re-enters into separate invoicing software. That is not really integration; it is a slightly tidier handoff. At the other end, an invoice is generated directly from a set of already-approved hours, with no re-entry step and no window in which a still-pending timesheet can be pulled onto a document by mistake.
What to check specifically: can an invoice be generated only from hours that have actually been approved, or can an admin pull in anything regardless of status. Does the invoice support the details a client's accounts-payable team will actually want, tax lines, bank details, a purchase order number where the client raised one, a firm's own logo and terms rather than a generic template. And does the finished PDF match what was reviewed on screen, or is there a risk of the document diverging from what an approver actually signed off on.
TimeSubmit's invoicing generates an invoice directly from a set of approved timesheets, and only from approved ones; a timesheet still sitting in Submitted cannot be pulled onto an invoice regardless of how uncontroversial it looks. An invoice supports tax lines, bank details, a custom logo, terms and footer, and an optional purchase order number typed in when the invoice is raised, which prints in the document's masthead. The invoice moves through a defined set of statuses, draft, sent, paid, overdue and archived, and the PDF is rendered from the exact same document as the on-screen view, so there is no separate template that could drift from what was actually approved.
Multi-currency and international invoicing
A consultancy billing clients in more than one country runs into this quickly: the software's own subscription price is quoted in one currency, which is entirely normal, but the invoices it raises against a consultancy's own clients often need to be quoted in whatever currency that particular client actually pays in. Those are two separate questions, and it is worth confirming a vendor treats them as such rather than assuming the second follows automatically from the first.
TimeSubmit's own subscription pricing is quoted and billed in US dollars. Separately, and independently of that, its invoicing supports raising a client invoice in a currency other than the consultancy's own, which is the case a consultancy billing across borders actually needs solved. When comparing tools, ask specifically whether client-facing invoices can be issued in a currency the consultancy chooses per client, rather than assuming a multi-currency claim on a features page covers this.
Pricing shape: seat-based against usage-metered
Timesheet submission software is priced in one of two broad shapes, and the difference matters more than the headline number.
Seat-based pricing charges per person with access to the tool, usually as a base fee covering a block of members plus a per-member rate above it. It is predictable: add a consultant, know exactly what that costs before you do it. Usage-metered pricing charges on something else entirely, timesheets submitted, hours logged, invoices generated, which can look cheaper at a small scale and get harder to forecast as usage grows, because the bill now depends on how busy a month actually is rather than on how many people are on the team.
For a small consultancy, the practical question is which shape matches how the practice actually changes. A consultancy that grows by adding consultants, the common case, is better served by a seat-based model it can predict a month in advance. A consultancy whose usage swings wildly month to month for reasons unrelated to headcount might prefer metering, but should ask exactly what is metered and get a real number for what a busy month has cost other customers, rather than an average.
TimeSubmit is priced on a seat basis. Practice runs $39 a month after a 60-day trial, covering up to five team members split across one admin, two consultants and two approvers. Core runs $42 a month, or $33 a month billed annually, covering three members, with additional members at $14 a month each. Margin runs $110 a month, or $90 a month billed annually, covering five members, with additional members at $22 a month each. Enterprise starts from $800 a month billed annually, covering 25 members, with additional members at $32 a month each, and is arranged directly with sales rather than bought self-serve. Full detail, including what each plan actually includes beyond headcount, is on the pricing page.
A short evaluation checklist
Before signing anything, run a trial against these specific points rather than a features list:
- Enter a full week of hours as a consultant would, on a phone as well as a laptop, and time how long it actually takes.
- Reject a test timesheet without a reason, and confirm the software actually stops you.
- Check whether an approver assigned to one project can see timesheets on a project they are not assigned to.
- Generate an invoice from a still-submitted, not-yet-approved timesheet, and confirm the software refuses.
- Ask for the exact monthly cost at your current headcount and at twice it, in writing, not an average.
- Confirm whether an audit log, and features like multi-approver sequencing, are available on the plan you are actually about to buy, not a higher one shown in the demo.
How TimeSubmit fits
Run against that checklist, TimeSubmit's answers are the ones described through this guide rather than a separate pitch: hours are entered on a week grid built for both weekly and monthly periods, an approver only ever sees the projects they are actually assigned to, rejection requires a typed and confirmed reason, invoicing pulls only from approved hours, and pricing is a predictable seat-based figure that can be checked in advance at any headcount. Consultancies evaluating this specifically for a management consulting practice may find TimeSubmit for management consultancies a more direct starting point than the general features pages, and the broader case for moving off a spreadsheet in the first place is set out in why every consultancy needs timesheet software.
Common questions about buying timesheet submission software
What is the single most important thing to check before buying timesheet submission software?
How approval actually works in practice, not on a features page. Check whether an approver is scoped to the right projects, whether rejection requires a stated reason, and whether an invoice can be generated from hours that have not actually been approved yet. Those three answers tell you more about whether the tool will hold up than any capture-side feature will.
Is seat-based or usage-metered pricing better for a small consultancy?
Seat-based pricing is usually the better fit for a consultancy that grows by adding people, which is the common pattern, because the monthly cost can be forecast a month ahead of any hiring decision. Usage-metered pricing can look cheaper at a small scale but gets harder to predict once usage varies month to month for reasons unrelated to headcount.
Does timesheet submission software need to support multi-currency invoicing?
Only if the consultancy bills clients who pay in a currency other than its own. Where that is the case, check the point explicitly rather than assuming it: a tool's own subscription price being quoted in one currency says nothing about whether the invoices it raises against a consultancy's own clients can be issued in a different one.
What should an audit trail on a timesheet actually record?
At minimum, who submitted, who reviewed and decided, and, where used, who applied any override and why. It should stay visible once the timesheet has moved on to a final status rather than disappearing at the point of approval, since the question of who actually signed something off tends to come up well after the decision was made.
Can a small consultancy get by without approval workflow features at all?
Only briefly, and only at a very small scale. Once more than one person is filing hours and someone other than the person who did the work needs to check them before a client is billed, an approval step with a real reason, a real record and a real escalation route for a blocked approver stops being optional. The risk without one is not a slow process; it is an invoice built on hours nobody actually checked.
Ready to see how hour capture, approval and invoicing connect in practice? Start a 60-day trial on the Practice plan, then $39 a month.