QuickBooks Time Manager Essentials: Tracking, Editing, and Approving Team Hours

QuickBooks Time gives managers and admins a set of tools for tracking, correcting, and approving employee hours — but the workflow lives inside QuickBooks Workforce, and the navigation isn’t always obvious. Here’s what managers need to know to handle timesheets, edits, and approvals without hitting dead ends.

Entering Time for Yourself or Your Team

Managers can create timesheets directly in QuickBooks Workforce. From the Track Time tab, the Menu option leads to an “Add timesheet” function where you choose between two entry modes.

Duration mode lets you enter total hours worked on a given date without specifying start and end times — useful for salaried or fixed-shift workers. Start-and-end mode (the default when Duration is toggled off) requires clock-in and clock-out times for the specific date.

The Worker field auto-populates with your own name. To enter time on behalf of a team member, select the Worker field and choose the correct person from the list. From there, add any job, customer, or notes the timesheet requires, then save.

For managers entering multiple timesheets for the same person, a “Keep editor open after save” option keeps the entry form active so you can move to the next date without restarting the workflow.

Correcting and Managing Existing Time

Editing a timesheet requires navigating to Time Entries, then Timesheets. By default, the view shows timesheets for everyone you manage, but the Team member search filter narrows it to a specific individual — helpful for teams with many employees.

Once you locate the timesheet, an edit function opens the Timesheet Editor, where you can adjust hours, job codes, customers, or notes. One common scenario: a team member forgets to clock out. In that case, the editor has a “Currently working” checkbox that, when unchecked, reveals a clock-out time field. The clock-out time cannot be set in the future — a guardrail that prevents inflating hours beyond the current moment.

Viewing the Change Log

Every timesheet carries a viewable activity log. Accessible from the Timesheets list, this log records when the team member clocked in and out, along with any subsequent edits. It captures who made each change, the date and time of the edit, and which specific fields were modified.

This matters for accountability. If a manager adjusts an employee’s hours, that edit is traceable. If an employee disputes a change, the log provides a record of what was altered and by whom.

Deleting a Timesheet Entry

Managers can delete timesheet entries entirely from the Timesheets list. The delete function removes the entry, which is distinct from editing — editing preserves the record with modifications, while deletion eliminates it. For managers removing time entered for someone else, the Team member search filter helps locate the correct entry before deleting.

Managing Time Off Requests

Time off requests appear alongside time-tracking functions in the manager workflow. Team members submit requests, and managers review and act on them from within the same interface they use for timesheet management.

Reviewing and Approving Time

Approval is the final step before time data flows downstream — typically to payroll. From the Track Time tab, the Menu leads to an “Approve time” function.

The approval screen defaults to a specific date range. If the range doesn’t match the pay period you need, a “More filters” option lets you adjust it. From there, managers have two paths:

• Approve all — approves time for the entire team at once, suitable when all timesheets have been reviewed and are accurate.
• Approve individually — approves one team member at a time, useful when some employees’ time is ready but others still need corrections.

Before approving, managers can select any team member’s name to review their hours and make last-minute edits if something looks off.

Key Takeaways for Managers

The manager role in QuickBooks Time centers on three responsibilities: ensuring time is accurately recorded, correcting entries when they’re wrong, and approving the final numbers. The Workforce interface consolidates these tasks, but the navigation requires moving between Menu options, Timesheets lists, and approval screens. The Team member search filter is the single most useful tool for managers handling large teams — it appears at multiple points in the workflow and cuts through the noise when you need to focus on one person’s time data.

For broader help with QuickBooks Time and related QuickBooks Online troubleshooting, the workflow differences between Time and the core accounting product are worth understanding, since data approved in Time typically feeds into payroll processing.