Turn on time tracking in Account and Settings, then open + New > Weekly timesheet, pick the employee and the week, and enter hours per day, split by customer or job if time gets billed back. Save it, and those hours are ready to pull into payroll. This is about logging worked hours, a separate feature from mileage tracking.
1. Turn on time tracking. Go to Settings, then Account and Settings, then the Advanced tab, and switch on Time tracking. You can choose here whether employees' hourly cost rates are visible to everyone entering time or just to admins.
2. Open a weekly timesheet. Select + New, then Weekly timesheet under the Employees column. Pick the employee and confirm the week you're entering.
3. Enter hours for each day. Fill in hours worked per day across the week. If the time needs to bill back to a specific customer or job, pick that from the dropdown on the same line and mark it billable.
4. Add a second line for a different job in the same week, if needed. One employee's timesheet can split across multiple customers or service items without creating separate entries.
5. Save the timesheet. Once saved, those hours are available to pull straight into a paycheck when you run payroll, instead of someone re-typing hours from a separate log.
6. For employees who clock in themselves, turn on QuickBooks Time instead of hand-entry. QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) lets employees clock in and out from their phone, with optional GPS, and those hours flow into QuickBooks Online Payroll automatically once approved, replacing the weekly timesheet form for businesses that use it.
7. Approve timesheets before running payroll. Whether entered by hand or through QuickBooks Time, review and approve hours first; unapproved time doesn't always pull into payroll cleanly.
A weekly timesheet works fine for one or two employees who remember to fill it in. It gets messy fast with a bigger crew: someone forgets a day, someone enters hours for the wrong week, and whoever runs payroll ends up chasing corrections right before a deadline that doesn't move.
QuickBooks Time closes part of that gap by having employees clock in themselves, but it still depends on someone reviewing and approving every entry before payroll runs, and it has no way to know if an employee clocked in from the wrong job site or forgot to clock out at all. That review is still a person checking a list by hand.
Missing clock-outs, shifts that run suspiciously long, or an employee who never submitted hours for the week get flagged ahead of the payroll run, instead of someone scanning every timesheet by eye looking for what's off.
When an employee clocks in at a job site tracked in your field service or scheduling tool, the hours land on the right QuickBooks job automatically, instead of someone matching timesheets to jobs after the fact.
Tell us where the corrections usually happen, missing entries, wrong job codes, late submissions, and we'll tell you if it can be caught before it becomes a payroll-day scramble.
Tell us what actually goes wrong, late entries, missing clock-outs, hours logged against the wrong job, and we'll tell you if it can be caught automatically before payroll instead of during it. Employee hours are one place this shows up; the same kind of manual double-checking tends to exist elsewhere in a business too, and that's fair game for us as well.
Let's talk →The weekly timesheet works much the same way: go to Employees > Enter Time > Use Weekly Timesheet, pick the employee and week, and fill in hours per day, with an option to assign each line to a customer or job. Desktop and Online use the same basic timesheet concept, just a different menu path to get there.
If you're running payroll directly without timesheets on file, you can enter hours straight into the paycheck itself during the payroll run, one line per pay type (regular, overtime, and so on) per employee. It works for a small, simple crew, but you lose the day-by-day record a timesheet gives you if hours ever get questioned.
They're entirely separate features. Employee hours (timesheets) track time worked for payroll and job costing. Mileage tracks miles driven for a deduction or reimbursement. An employee can have hours logged for a shift and zero mileage, or vice versa, and neither feature pulls data from the other.
Mark the relevant line on the timesheet as billable and tie it to the customer or job. Once it's saved, that time is available to pull straight onto an invoice for that customer, so you're not retyping hours a second time just to bill them.