Most time tracking tools focus on capture: timers, idle detection, calendar sync. But for a firm that bills or pays against hours, capture was never the hard part.

The hard part is the moment hours become official: safe to invoice from, safe to run payroll from, safe to defend in a dispute. That moment is the approval workflow. Here is each stage, and how Temporic handles it.

Draft

The week belongs to the employee. Hours in draft are working notes: editable, incomplete, sometimes wrong in ways that don't matter yet. A good system leaves drafts alone. No mid-week nagging, no manager watching every cell.

Temporic's reminder email goes out for weeks left in draft, and each person chooses in Settings which emails they get.

Ready for review

This is the employee's statement that the week is complete and true. It is what makes chasing finite: before it, the week is the employee's responsibility; after it, the reviewer's. Tools without this moment leave responsibility smeared across both.

In Temporic, a week becomes ready for review when it ends. If your workspace requires confirmation, it waits until the employee confirms it instead. Managers review their direct reports, and admins can review everyone.

Mistakes happen after submitting. If nobody has reviewed the week yet, the employee can choose Take back to edit, fix it and send it again, without asking anyone.

Approved or returned

The reviewer either approves the week or returns it with a reason. The return path matters more than it looks. Without it, managers quietly fix employees' hours, and the record stops being the employee's statement. With it, every correction is visible and attributed.

A few cases come up every week:

An empty week. Someone was away and logged nothing. The reviewer uses Confirm no hours, so the week is settled rather than left looking missing.
The employee is unavailable. A reviewer can approve on their behalf, and the log records who did it.
A mistake after approval. An admin can Reopen an approved week, so it goes back for correction and approval again.

Locked

Once payroll has run or the invoice has gone out, the week must stop moving. Locking is what lets you trust March's numbers in July.

In Temporic, only an admin can Lock approved weeks, and only an admin can Reopen a locked one. Reopening is a deliberate, logged act, not an edit that happens to work.

Why it matters for payroll

Approval is only useful if payroll respects it. In Temporic, payroll counts approved and locked weeks only. Hours still waiting for review are shown as held back, with the name of whoever is holding them, so you know who to ask before you pay.

Say Sam Okafor's week is reopened and corrected after you exported payroll. The owner sees it on Home and in Reports, by name ("Sam Okafor: 77.00 h exported, 69.00 h now"), and whoever exported gets one email once the correction is approved. You export that period again and the alert clears.

The audit trail underneath

Each step (who submitted, who approved, who returned it and why, who reopened it) is the evidence. It answers a client's "prove these hours" and an accountant's "who authorized this overtime?". A timesheet system that doesn't record these steps is a prettier spreadsheet.

This cycle is the core of Temporic. Employees see a weekly grid, reviewers see a queue on the Approvals page, and admins see what's approved, locked and ready for payroll. If your current tool tracks time but can't say who made hours official, that is the gap to close, with us or otherwise.