The week, not the day
A timesheet in BookKept is a week against a placement. Entries are days: date, minutes worked, unpaid break minutes, and a note. For a placement billed by the day rather than the hour, a day carries a unit between 0.5 and 1.0 instead of minutes, because a half day is a real thing and rounding it to hours invents a number nobody agreed.
Weeks start as DRAFT. Anyone on the desk can build one, and it can be rebuilt as often as needed while it is still a draft.
Who may approve, and how they are asked
A week is submitted to a named contact at the client, and only a contact marked as able to approve timesheets can be chosen. That contact receives a link by email; the link carries a single-use token that opens one week and nothing else.
The approval link is delivered to the approver and to nobody else. It is deliberately not returned to whoever submitted the week, because handing it back would let agency staff approve their own worker's hours from the response. The one exception is the development profile, where there is no mail provider and the developer is both parties anyway.
Who chases, and when
Nobody has to. Every morning at 07:20 the system reminds approvers who have gone quiet, through the same door as the desk's Remind button: a fresh single-use link, on the cadence the agency sets under Settings (after two days, then every three, at most three times, unless you say otherwise). On Mondays it nudges workers whose last week is missing or still a draft, with a fresh portal link, and posts the book in one reading to everyone who can sign in: what is waiting on a client, what is approved and unbilled, what an inspector would find first, and what was chased that morning.
Every reminder, nudge and digest is written to the audit chain under the actor monday-post, so who was chased, when and how often is answerable from the record. Any of the three can be switched off, and the desk shows what tomorrow morning would do before it does it.
What approval sets off
An approved week is the input to both sides of the money. The self-billed purchase invoice to the worker or their umbrella is raised from it at the pay rate, and the agency's own sales invoice to the client is raised from the same week at the charge rate. Neither is typed. If the two ever disagree, they disagree about a week that a client put their name to, which is a conversation you can have.
Approval is a compliance-relevant act, so it writes an audit event chained to the one before it. The evidence pack for that placement then carries the week, who approved it, when, and from which address.
Where the hours come from
- The desk. A consultant enters the week.
- The worker. They enter their own week from the worker portal, and it joins the same approval chain rather than a separate one.
- The rota. On shift work, worked shifts are turned into the week. See rota and shifts.
- Your own system. Push weeks over the API. See the API reference.
A week from draft to signed off
The demo agency has weeks at every stage, including one waiting on a client. Open it as the staff desk, then walk into the client portal and sign one off.