Approve timecards

Approving a timecard is the manager’s statement that the hours on it are what the employee actually worked.

It is worth being clear about what approval is and is not. Payroll pays every finished timecard — anything clocked out and not rejected — whether or not it has been approved. Approving does not make hours payable and leaving a card unapproved does not hold payroll up. What approval does is seal the card so it cannot change quietly, and record that a human looked at it. Review is the point, not permission.

Review before you approve

Open Timesheets, switch to the pay period view, and work down the list. The things worth checking every time:

• Open punches (employees still clocked in). These matter most: a card with no clock-out is excluded from payroll altogether, so those hours go unpaid until someone closes it — see Fix a missed punch.
• Very long or very short shifts. A fourteen-hour day or a nine-minute day is usually a punch problem, not a scheduling one.
• Missing breaks. If your store’s rules expect a break and none was recorded, find out whether it was taken.
• Overtime. Where overtime applies, it is calculated over the workweek defined in your store settings, which may not line up with the pay period boundary.

Approve

Approve per employee, or use Approve all visible to approve the whole filtered list at once. Approval locks the card in the same action: punches on it can no longer be edited, which is what keeps the numbers from shifting after you have signed off on them.

Correcting a card you already approved

There is no “un-approve” button. The sequence is:

1. Unlock the timecard.
2. Edit it. Editing automatically withdraws the approval — the card goes back to needing review, and that applies to every edit, down to a note.
3. Approve it again, which re-seals it.

This works right up until payroll is submitted for the period. Once a run is submitted, the timecards it imported are locked for good and a correction means an off-cycle run instead of an edit.

Then run payroll

You do not have to approve everything before running payroll — but the review is a great deal cheaper before the run than after it. See Run payroll.