Weekly Timesheet Capture & Submit: Get Hours In On Time, Validated, and Approved
A logged-in weekly timesheet grid where people log hours by project and task across the days of the week, with built-in validation, a submit-for-approval flow, and a clean CSV export to billing or payroll — so the PM stops chasing hours and the numbers are right before they leave the building.
A logged-in tool where each person opens their week, logs hours by project and task across the days, the grid validates totals and required codes as they type, they submit the week, a manager reviews and approves it, the timesheet locks against further edits, and approved time exports as a clean CSV in your billing/payroll columns.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- A list of projects/tasks/codes (CSV or Google Sheet)
- A list of people (CSV or Google Sheet)
- Your billing/payroll export column layout
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Every week ends the same way: a manager pinging six people on Slack for their hours, three of them filling in a spreadsheet from memory on Friday afternoon, two of them forgetting the project code so the billing team has to guess, and one of them quietly editing last week's numbers after they were already invoiced. The timesheet "system" is a shared workbook that anyone can overwrite, where nothing is validated, nobody knows what's been submitted versus what's still missing, and the same person's week sometimes gets pasted in twice.
Then payroll or billing has to clean it all up by hand — chasing missing codes, reconciling totals that don't add up to 40, and trying to remember whether the version they're looking at was the one the manager actually signed off on. Hours go out late, billable time leaks, and disputes ("I never approved that") have no paper trail to settle them.
Time capture deserves to be a real, governed application — one that validates as people type, knows exactly who has and hasn't submitted, locks a week once it's approved, and hands billing a clean file every time.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for your team. Each person logs in and sees their week as a grid: projects and tasks down one side, the days of the week across the top, hours typed into the cells. As they type, the tool validates in real time — daily totals, the weekly total against a maximum, and your required-field rules (every line needs a real project code, billable lines need a billable flag). When the week looks right, they submit it.
That submission goes to their manager, who sees a queue of pending timesheets, reviews the hours, and approves (or sends it back with a note). The moment a week is approved, it locks — no more edits — and the approved hours are ready to export as a clean CSV in exactly the columns your billing or payroll system expects. The PM gets a live view of who's in and who's still missing, so the weekly chase turns into a glance.
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 your week is defined, what your projects/tasks/codes actually look like and how they're named, your daily and weekly hour rules, how billable vs. non-billable works, who approves whose hours, and the messy exceptions (overtime, time off, multi-manager approvals, mid-week project changes). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything — so the grid, the validations, and the export match how your team really tracks time, not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the data model, importing your projects and people, building the weekly grid, the live validation, the submit step, the manager approval queue, the lock-on-approval behavior, and the billing/payroll CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that loads projects and people from a Google Sheet / CSV and exports approved time as a clean CSV — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend, no integration required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
Time data flows straight into money — invoices and paychecks — so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your team can use the tool, row-level security so people only ever see their own timesheets (and managers only their team's), a complete audit trail of who logged, submitted, approved, or reopened each week, a hard human-approval gate so no hours reach billing or payroll until a manager signs off, edit-locking so an approved week can't be quietly changed, and a duplicate guard on (person + week) so the same week can never be submitted or counted twice.
Who it's for
Consultants, agency and professional-services staff, in-house project teams, and the project managers and ops people who spend every Friday chasing hours. If you can describe how your team logs time today and what your billing or payroll file needs to look like, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll have a real, validated week grid on screen before the weekend's out.