Timesheet Hours Not Reaching QuickBooks Advanced Payroll Pay Runs

Among UK users of QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll, one question keeps returning to the community boards: hours have been tracked, yet the pay run shows none of them. The accepted answer to that thread, posted by Intuit, points to a cause quieter than a fault. The timesheet side of the product is a separate capability, switched off until it is enabled, and hours move across only through an import.

The symptom: hours that sit outside the pay run

The pattern is consistent. Time gets recorded, either in QuickBooks itself or in a third-party time tracking tool, and payroll day arrives with a run that knows nothing about it. Nothing has been lost. The hours simply have not been imported, and the software will not fetch them on its own. The answer speaks to the UK configuration of the product, which is where the question was raised.

Intuit presents the import tool as a convenience for teams that track hours elsewhere. That framing is fair, but it hides the practical point. An import is a required step rather than an optional extra, and it carries a prerequisite.

Turn the timesheet feature on first

The accepted answer starts with a setting that catches people out. Open the Employees area from the payroll section, then select the Payroll Settings tab. Under Business Management, choose Timesheets and select Enable. Until that is done, the import menus lead nowhere useful.

Miss this step and the menus still appear, yet nothing arrives, because the capability underneath them stays dormant. It is the quietest failure mode in the whole process.

Two ways to run the import

For the whole payroll at once, stay in the Employees area. Under Manage Employees, select Import Timesheets and choose a source from the dropdown. Picking QuickBooks pulls in timesheets created in QuickBooks itself. Other sources cover outside providers. Set the date range, then select Import.

A single employee is handled from inside the pay run. Select the person, open Actions, and choose Import timesheets. You can limit the pull to the current period or include previous periods as well. Once the import finishes, the pay run recalculates with the new hours included. That recalculation matters when you revisit a run that has already been reviewed.

What does a custom file need to import cleanly?

Tools without a direct connection can still feed payroll through a file upload. The answer sets firm rules. The file must be CSV or TSV, with one timesheet entry per line. Each line needs, at minimum, either a start and end date with times, or a plain date plus units of time. The employee must be identifiable on every line.

The upload follows the same route as the rest. In the Employees area, under Manage Employees, choose Import Timesheets and select Custom file upload. Browse to your file and confirm the upload. Next comes the date format. Set it to match how the file orders day, month, and year, since the same digits can mean different dates otherwise.

You then map each column, with a preview of the first few lines shown to help you judge what each one holds. A final choice waits at the end: entries can be approved automatically on arrival, or sent through the standard approval workflow. Select Import to finish.

Errors surface after the upload rather than being prevented before it. The remedy is to fix the file and upload it again, or to remap the columns and retry. The column preview is there to catch a wrong mapping before you commit. A clean run ends with a success message and a count of the records brought in.

A limit on replacing hours already in a pay run

One caveat sits at the end of the answer, and it deserves wider attention. Timesheets already included in a pay run may not be replaced by a later import. In practice, that points to a simple habit: run imports before the pay run is assembled, not after. If hours look wrong once a run is built, the per-employee import inside that run is the correction route the answer offers.

Our read

The feature works, and the guidance around it holds together. Most missing-hours mysteries in this product trace back to the disabled setting or to a file that fails the format rules. Neither is visible from inside a pay run, which is why the same question keeps coming back. For teams tracking hours elsewhere, the file upload is what makes the whole workflow viable.