Most time-tracking tools obsess over 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, and it has four states worth understanding.
Draft
The employee's workspace. Hours in draft are private working notes - editable, incomplete, wrong in ways that don't matter yet. A good system leaves drafts alone: no manager visibility theater, no nagging mid-week.
Submitted
The employee's statement: "this week is complete and true." Submission is the handshake that makes chasing finite - before it, the week is the employee's responsibility; after it, the manager's. Tools without a real submission moment leave that responsibility permanently smeared across both.
Approved - or returned
The manager either signs off or sends the week back with a reason. The return path matters more than it looks: without it, managers "fix" employee hours silently, and the record stops being the employee's statement at all. With it, every correction is visible and attributed.
Locked
Once payroll ran or the invoice went out, the week must stop moving. Locking is what lets you trust March's numbers in July. If someone genuinely needs to fix a locked week, reopening should be a deliberate, logged act by an admin - not an edit that happens to work.
The audit trail underneath
Each transition - who submitted, who approved, who returned with what comment, who reopened - is the evidence layer. It's what answers a client's "prove these hours" and an accountant's "who authorized this overtime." A timesheet system that doesn't record transitions is a prettier spreadsheet.
This cycle is the spine of Temporic: employees see a two-minute weekly grid, managers see a queue of submitted weeks, admins see what's approved, locked and ready for export. If your current tool tracks time but can't say who made hours official, that's the gap to close - with us or otherwise.