Timesheet Approval & Exception Reviewer: Stop Reading Every Timesheet

The problem this kills

Approving timesheets is one of those weekly chores that eats a manager's Monday morning. Twenty, fifty, two hundred timesheets land in your inbox, and almost all of them are fine — but you can't just rubber-stamp them, because buried in the pile is the person who forgot Thursday, the contractor who logged 60 hours, the consultant who billed time to a project that closed last month, and the analyst who recorded a full week with zero billable hours. So you open every single one, scan for the problems, and approve them one by one. It's slow, it's mind-numbing, and the things you're actually looking for are the few that are wrong.

The cost isn't just your time. A missed exception becomes a payroll error, a project that gets billed for hours it shouldn't, or a utilization number that's quietly wrong all quarter. You don't need to read every timesheet to catch the bad ones — you need a tool that reads them for you and only shows you the ones that need a human. And you don't need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. Each pay period you import two things: the submitted timesheets (a CSV or sheet — person, project, day, hours) and your projects list with status (open, closed, non-billable). The tool runs your exception rules over every timesheet — missing days, total hours under or over your expected range, time charged to a closed project, no billable hours, suspicious round numbers, whatever you define — and splits the pile into "clean" and "needs a look." You see a review queue that shows only the flagged timesheets, with the reason each was flagged. You bulk-approve everyone who's clean, fix or return the ones that aren't (with a reason that gets logged and emailed back to the employee), and when you're done, the tool exports only approved time as a CSV in the exact column layout your payroll or PSA system expects. Rules live in a settings screen you can edit without touching code.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how approvals work today and who does them, what system your timesheets come out of, the exact columns and naming in your data, how a "week" and "billable" are defined for you, your real expected-hours range and approval rules, and the messy edge cases like partial weeks, leave, and multi-project days — and then it tailors the data model, the exception rules, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the timesheet import, the projects import, the editable rules engine, the review queue with bulk-approve and return-with-reason, and the approved-time CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today even with no API into your timekeeping system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real approval tooling that feeds payroll and billing, so it ships with the controls a finance or PMO team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's timesheets, a complete audit trail of who approved, returned, or edited which timesheet and when, a hard human-approval gate so nothing is exported until a person signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on (person + week) so an already-approved week can't be re-imported and re-processed. Returns carry a logged reason and notify the employee, so there's a clean record of why time was sent back.

Who it's for

Project managers, resource managers, and finance/payroll approvers who own timesheet sign-off and are tired of opening every timesheet to find the handful that are wrong. If you can describe the rules you check by hand today, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll watch your first review queue light up only the timesheets that actually need you the same afternoon.