Hello! It sounds like you are tracking their billable working hours – whether it’s through having your employees clock in or through digital tracking. So long as you record and retain the dates and times your employees work in some form, you do not need to keep a timesheet or something similar. You just need to be aware of when and for how long your employees work, along with when they are taking time off or are working outside of full-time hours. Technically, a work schedule is a form of a timesheet, for example.

If your employee works outside of the typical 40 hour work week – especially on a consistent basis – both you and them can keep track of this overtime to ensure they are compensated accordingly. Otherwise, traditional digital logs or HR software that tracks who is going to be in the office and who is not on any given day suffices for tracking billable working time.

For audit purposes and to prevent time theft, I suggest you keep a record of overtime hours and who is working when. You don’t need to keep a strict timesheet, but it is handy to have a system in place for knowing how many vacation days an employee has in the bank, for example, by having something everyone can reference for timekeeping purposes (your HR manager will know some good programs to use, like Humi). However, legally you do not need to keep a “timesheet”.

When you don’t have a specific timesheet in place, you can suffer from some pitfalls – to avoid these, check out this article on HRInsider. So long as you follow those tips and track time in your own way, you should be perfectly fine. Thank you for your question!

-HR Insider Staff