QuickBooks Time Approvals Lock Hours Until You Unapprove Them
Approved hours in QuickBooks Time lock against edits; unapproving unlocks them, and exported time needs a separate unlock capped at 90 days.
The recurring approvals question in QuickBooks Time threads comes down to one word: lock. When a reviewer approves hours, the confirmation action reads Approve and lock time, and that lock is literal. The timesheet stops accepting changes until someone reverses the approval. The accepted answer walks through approving, unapproving, and rejecting time, and its most useful detail is the exported-time catch.
Approval locks the hours
Approving time is always a two-step confirmation. You choose Approve beside a person’s name, then confirm with Approve and lock time. From that moment the hours are sealed. The design is defensible: approved hours feed payroll and invoices, so Intuit locks them to keep the sign-off meaningful. The friction shows up later. A missing entry or a wrong total surfaces after approval, and the fix is not a setting. It is process: unapprove, unlock if needed, correct, and approve again.
Reaching the approvals screen
Everything here starts in QuickBooks Online. Open All apps, select Time, and then select Approvals. That single screen does the daily work: filter the status, change the date range, or search for a specific team member. A second environment, QuickBooks Time itself, enters the picture only for the exported-time unlock. We will flag that handoff where it matters.
Approve one person at a time
Two approval flows share this screen, and blending them is what confuses new reviewers. The first is the row-by-row route. Filter the status to Unapproved, set the date range, and find the person. Approve beside their name starts the action, and Approve and lock time confirms it. Prefer to inspect the entries first? Select the person’s name to open the timesheet, review it, then choose Approve time and the same lock confirmation. Use the review-first variant whenever a total looks wrong, because you can still fix entries before signing off.
Approve a whole period from the report
The second flow is the report route, built for closing a week in one pass. Set the report dates, choose the team members, and run the report. Then either select all unapproved entries at once or tick individual people, and choose Approve Selected. The row-level Approve buttons sit alongside the bulk action, so you can exempt someone on the spot. One display switch deserves a mention: it flips hour totals between decimals and hours-and-minutes, so 7.5 reads as 7 hours 30 minutes. That toggle helps when you are eyeballing totals.
Unapprove first, then unlock exported time
Reversing an approval mirrors the original action. Filter the status to Approved, find the person, and choose Unapprove beside their time. Confirm with Unapprove and unlock time. The report route offers the same reversal: run the report, then select Unapprove for the person or period involved.
Then comes the trap. If those hours were already exported to QuickBooks, the unlock inside approvals is not enough. You must move to QuickBooks Time, open the QuickBooks dropdown, and choose Unlock Exported Time. Set a start and end date, select the employees, review the listed timesheets, and unlock them. A confirmation notice seals it. The ceiling is firm: unlocking works only on the past 90 days.
Rejecting time sends it back
Reject sits beside Approve as the other verdict. Choosing it prompts you for a reason, which you enter and send. That reason step deserves attention, because a bare rejection leaves the person guessing what to fix. Be specific. The rejected hours then wait unapproved, ready for correction and a fresh review.
Fixing hours during review
The approvals screen doubles as a correction tool. Open a team member’s timesheet, then choose view details beside the hours. From there you can add a missing entry in the timesheet editor, edit an existing one, or delete it outright; deletions demand a confirmation click. This is where the review-first route pays off. Catch a bad entry before locking, and you skip the unapprove and unlock routine entirely.
The gaps the answer leaves open
The accepted answer assumes approvals are already on and that you hold reviewer rights. It never covers enabling the feature or assigning approvers, so if the Approvals option is missing, permissions and setup are the first suspects. It is equally silent past the 90-day ceiling, where the unlock tool simply stops reaching. Nothing in the answer addresses older corrections, and that marks the honest edge of the fix. These omissions do not break the workflow. They simply tell you where it ends.