Stop the Friday timesheet chase. Confirm the week against the plan.
If your people fill in a timesheet today, it most likely goes to billing or payroll and stops there. It is filled in on Friday from memory, chased at month end, and never compared with the plan the project was staffed on.
The blank row is the problem, not the person who has not filled it in.
Spreadsheets and lightweight trackers collect hours well. Without a staffing plan beside them, each week starts empty, or carries over whatever was there last week, so someone chases completeness before finance can trust the export. That chase is real work, and it sits downstream of a decision already taken. When the deal was priced, someone decided who would be on the project and for how many days. Time should confirm what ran against that plan, not ask people to rebuild it from memory.
Meanwhile the plan and the delivery drift apart where nobody is looking. A senior planned at four days a week is doing five. A phase that was meant to finish in March is still absorbing days in May. The project manager knows, roughly. Finance finds out when the invoice is smaller than the outlook said it would be. By then the days have been worked, the client has been given a number, and the only decision left is who absorbs the difference.
The timecard reads from the project plan.
In Profitdrive, when a deal is won the deal model becomes the project plan, with the same roles, people and days. Because the plan already knows who is assigned to what, a person's week opens with a row for each client, project and phase they are assigned to, and a column for each working day. Hours are prefilled from the assigned days in the plan, so a full week on one project arrives complete and needs only a confirmation. Internal projects arrive with billable switched off. A public holiday locks its day unless the person says they worked it. Profitdrive is designed from operating experience inside services firms at scale, and that is where details like those come from.
Confirm, adjust, add leave, submit. On a phone.
For most people, most weeks, that is all it takes. Check the rows, adjust a day where delivery differed from the plan, add the Friday you took off, submit. Leave is entered in the same grid, by leave type and date, and reduces what is expected of the week.
Save and Submit are separate, so a half-done week is never mistaken for a finished one. On a phone the same week is a stack of project cards with a bar at the bottom carrying the totals and the Save and Submit actions, sized for a thumb.
Completeness and exceptions, not an approval queue.
By default nobody approves time. A submitted week is the record, and the manager's part is completeness and exceptions. Two views carry the manager's part. Coverage answers the Monday question of who has not started, who has a draft and who has submitted. Instead of asking the room who has not done their timesheet, the manager reads it.
Exceptions puts planned days from the project plan against delivered days from the cards, per person and project, with a tolerance you set. The signals are missing time, under delivery, over delivery, and a booking on a project the person was not planned on. They are information for a conversation, never a gate on the person. A correction is a reopen with a reason, which returns the week to the person to fix and resubmit. If your firm wants a confirmation step, review mode adds one. There is no approver chain and no reject button.
A cost fact on the project, and invoice lines for the accounting system.
Accepted time becomes delivered days and delivered cost, on the project and on the person, at the daily cost that applied in that month. It does not produce revenue, contribution or margin. The outlook is still built from the plan, and accepted time is compared with it to show how the plan is turning out.
The same accepted time feeds the export of invoice lines for your accounting system. You pick a month, generate the candidate lines, untick what should not bill, and download a CSV your accounting system can import. The invoice is made in the accounting system, not in Profitdrive. Xero is the first accounting system connected.
Timecards is optional and switched on per firm, and time records already in a spreadsheet can be imported. A 40-plus person IT services firm already runs on Profitdrive with Timecards switched on.
If your people already fill in a timesheet, who compares it with the plan?
If it feeds billing and payroll and nothing else, the answer is probably nobody. The Timecards page covers My week, the manager view, month close, import and invoice output in more detail, and the approach page sets out where time sits in the wider view. The demo runs on a firm where that answer is visible. It is free and ready to use, and you are welcome to open it.