How to move a small team off spreadsheet timesheets

Spreadsheet timesheets don't fail loudly. They fail the Friday someone pastes over last week's tab, the month-end when three people's hours arrive after invoicing, and the day a client disputes a bill and nobody can say who approved the hours behind it.

If your firm bills or pays against time, the spreadsheet is often the last piece of core infrastructure still held together by habit. This guide covers what it can't do and how to replace it in one week.

What a spreadsheet can't do

• Mark a week as done. There is no moment where an employee says "this week is complete". Hours stay editable forever, so chasing never ends.
• Record who approved it. A manager glancing at a tab is not an audit trail. When payroll or a client asks "who signed off on this?", a cell has no answer.
• Lock a week. The week you invoiced in March should not be editable in July. In a spreadsheet it always is.
• Keep time off in the same place. Time off lives in a second spreadsheet or an email thread. Balances are worked out by hand, and they never quite match the hours sheet.

The switch, in order

The mistake most firms make is moving history first. Don't. Old weeks can stay in the spreadsheet. The goal is that next week happens in the new system.

1. Recreate your project list. Whatever the columns in your sheet were (clients, jobs, internal buckets), those become projects. Mark which ones are billable. For most firms this takes about 15 minutes.
2. Invite the team with roles. Decide who fills in timesheets, who approves them and who runs reports. In Temporic those are Employee, Manager and Admin, and most tools have an equivalent.
3. Run one parallel week. Everyone fills in both the sheet and the new system for a single week. You are not testing the software. You are surfacing local habits ("we always book Friday afternoons to admin") that need a home.
4. Cut over on a Monday, and retire the sheet visibly. Lock the old file or move it to an archive folder. If the spreadsheet stays writable, it stays alive.

What "done" looks like

One approved week. Not a configured account, but a week where every employee's hours are in, a manager approved them, and the week is locked. That is the moment the system has replaced the spreadsheet, and you can reach it in the first week.

Everything else builds on that loop: budgets, rates, invoices and payroll exports all depend on hours someone has approved.

How Temporic handles it

Temporic is built around that loop. Employees fill in a weekly grid, and can copy last week or drag a value across days. When a week ends it is ready for review, and a manager approves it or returns it with a reason. An admin locks approved weeks for payroll, and every step is in the audit log.

Time off lives in the same place, with balances per leave type, and approved time off shows on the timesheet. When the month closes, you download a payroll file that Gusto or ADP RUN imports (or a plain CSV for any other provider), and your accountant can join free to check it.

The 30-day free trial needs no credit card. That is long enough to run the parallel week and three real ones.