If you’ve ever closed payroll, wondering why the numbers don’t line up with the work that actually got done, you’re not alone.
Timesheet errors aren’t usually a result of a lack of effort. It’s the small, repeatable gaps baked into how time is captured, approved, and processed for payroll. The adage is true: time is money. From unintentional mistakes like missed punches, to outright manipulation like malicious time theft, every timesheet error has a cost to your organization.
This guide breaks down the most common timesheet errors, what they look like in the real world, and provides practical ways to address them without micromanagement.
Timesheet error 1: Illegibility or unclear inputs
Among the most avoidable timesheet issues are the use of paper cards, handwritten logs, and free-text notes, which invite misreads and “best guesses.” Even minor discrepancies (a 7 that looks like a 1, or a missing AM/PM) compound across people and pay periods.
Scenario: A foreman hands in three paper cards with smudged totals after a rainy week. Payroll spends half a day reconciling and still isn’t entirely confident.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Replace free text with structured fields and required formats.
- Use digital clocks/apps with on-screen confirmation.
- Add submission attestation so employees can verify accuracy.
Timesheet error 2: Missed punches and logs
Forgetting to punch or logging after the fact creates gaps and guesswork, especially for teams working in the field. These gaps force managers into reconstructions and “best estimates” that are hard to defend in audits. Close the distance between the work and the capture.
Scenario: A night shift in a manufacturing facility skips the out-punch, and a manager fixes it the next morning without a note. Or, a home healthcare aid forgets to log travel time from the patient’s home back to the satellite office.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Enable missed-punch workflows with mandatory reason notes.
- Use mobile time clocks with geofencing, map view, or optional photo verification.
- Prompt reminders near shift end; coach for same-day fixes.
Timesheet error 3: Calculation and rounding inaccuracies
Manual math at week-end is one of the most common timesheet error drivers, especially around short overlaps and thresholds. Humans are great at judgment calls, not at adding dozens of fragmented intervals under pressure. Automate the math so managers can focus on exceptions.
Scenario: A construction supervisor totals overtime by eye and misses a handful of 15- to 30-minute overlaps between sites. Payroll overpays and billing deals with inflated expenses.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Calculate hours worked in real time as hours are captured.
- Codify pay rules once (OT, shift differentials, premiums); lock totals after approval.
- If using rounding, set neutral rules and audit variance.
Timesheet error 4: Multiple systems & duplicates
Parallel time tracking spreadsheets, paper, and apps create double entries and reconciliation churn. When time lives in more than one place, you spend Fridays being a detective instead of closing payroll. A single source of truth collapses that chaos.
Scenario: A long-term care team clocks in at a kiosk and also emails a spreadsheet “for backup.” Both get imported by payroll, creating discrepancies in actual hours worked.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Standardize on one platform; eliminate physical to digital translation.
- De-dupe on import; block manual adds when a punch exists.
- Set one submission/approval cadence; integrate with payroll.
Timesheet error 5: Missed breaks and overtime leakage
Auto-deducted meals, lack of attestations, and clock drift result in premiums and unexpected overtime pay. On the flipside, missed breaks create a risk for labor law compliance and overtime. Most of this hour leakage comes from small, repeated timing offsets that snowball into extra minutes, eventually accumulating into hours.
While some overtime occurs due to demand fluctuations you can’t control, try to maintain breaks and punch windows as controlled processes, not suggestions.
Scenario: In a restaurant, the brunch rush on Sunday interrupts meal breaks throughout the entire shift, leading to excessive overtime. Meanwhile, in a retail environment, the morning crew clocks in early to chat while the closing crew stretches the final shift every night for extra hours.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Prompt meal/rest attestations at clock-out; route exceptions.
- Enforce schedule-aligned punch windows and grace periods.
- Surface-projected OT mid-week and adjust schedules in real time.
Timesheet error 6: Time theft (buddy punching, padding, device abuse)
Not all time theft is malicious — some is drift. But both cost you. The fix isn’t being suspicious of every employee, but building safeguards like identity checks and location controls that make the honest path the easy path.
Scenario: In a corporate office, this can occur when one worker “does a favor” for another coworker by swiping them in early while the coworker is at a morning appointment. In construction, this could look like crew members padding times on remote job sites.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Use secure clocks (PIN + photo/biometric), geofencing, and rotating kiosk mode.
- Set neutral rounding and clear grace rules.
- Run exception reports for early/late and rapid consecutive punches.
Timesheet error 7: Job costing accuracy & revenue leakage
Timesheet issues with late or incorrect project/task codes can distort margins, while approved billables may go unsubmitted. Selling generates revenue, but only if the work is accurately captured the first time around. Codes for job costing must be easy to select and hard to ignore.
Scenario: During a declared storm, public works crews kept clocking time under the default “Routine Maintenance” code instead of selecting the incident ID, so those hours weren’t eligible for reimbursement and couldn’t be cleanly audited.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Require job/task code at punch and on task switch.
- Lock billing attributes post-approval.
- Reconcile “approved billable not invoiced” before close.
Timesheet error 8: Managing timesheets and time tracking in isolation
When you manage time in standalone time tracking spreadsheets, you discover problems only at payroll. That means you only react to overtime, coverage misses, or accrual surprises, rather than preventing them from happening. Time tracking impacts scheduling, payroll, shift coverage, compliance, and more.
Looking at the full picture with integrations helps move fixes to the planning stage.
Scenario: In a textile manufacturing plant, this looks like coverage gaps getting “solved” with weekend OT because scheduling doesn’t see time. In higher education, this could occur when student workers exceed term caps because time and leave management systems don’t communicate effectively.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Connect time with scheduling and payroll so rules and approvals flow end-to-end.
- At minimum, use mapped exports/imports (pay codes, job codes, cost centers).
- Lean toward time tracking systems with proven ease of use and integrations.
Timesheet error 9: Change control failures
Edits without reasons, and changes after approval, break audit trails and payroll alignment. You can’t protect wage accuracy if the record keeps moving. Treat post-capture changes as exceptions with visible fingerprints.
Scenario: The pay period closes on Friday, but on Monday, a hotel manager “fixes” two shifts and forgets to re-run payroll adjustments. Everything looks correct on paper, but a direct deposit dispute the following week tells a different story.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Require reason notes on all edits; show before/after values, who, and when.
- Lock at approval; escalate reopen requests; dual approve post-approval changes.
- Report weekly on changes after approval.
Timesheet error 10: Approval workflow failures
Approvals by the wrong person or lengthy delays create payroll and billing fallout. Without accountability, approvals turn into box-checking or can get skipped entirely. Route to the right person and enforce a clock.
Scenario: A K-12 secretary bulk-approves paraprofessional timesheets to hit the payroll deadline, bypassing the designated approver (e.g., principal or special education coordinator). Hours are paid, but may post to the wrong cost center (SPED vs. gen-ed) and lack the required attestations for IEP support minutes, creating audit risk.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Route to named supervisors; block admin accounts from approving.
- Set close dates; prevent export until approvals are complete.
- Nudge before close; auto-escalate or expire stale submissions.
Timesheet error 11: Attribute toggling & rate changes
Flipping billable to non-billable, payable to non-payable, or changing rates mid-cycle skews revenue and labor compliance. Attribute discipline belongs at the source in time tracking — job codes and tasks — not in ad-hoc fixes after the fact.
Scenario: A department head reallocates hours from R&D to general admin to cover a grant hour overage, allowing a project to be completed; an enterprise org faces a rate table change after time was already captured for the pay period, impacting project profitability.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Set attributes at job/task; restrict overrides.
- Log any override with reason and approver; alert finance on rate changes.
- Reconcile attribute changes against invoices before close.
Timesheet error 12: Outlier & overtime blind spots
Without alerts and variance views, spikes go unnoticed. What you don’t monitor becomes your new baseline (and that baseline drift is expensive). Dashboards and thresholds keep attention where it matters.
Scenario: A hospitality setup team clocks in early for the majority of event season; cumulative drift adds a full FTE of unplanned hours by month-end. A small business inventory prep period starts 30 minutes early all week, causing department hours to sit 7–10% above average through the entire reset cycle.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Enable alerts for OT thresholds and hour outliers by person, team, and site.
- Review weekly variance dashboards and investigate same-day.
- Tie alerts to scheduling so supervisors can adjust coverage before OT lands.
Timesheet error 13: Budget/allocation drift & high-adjustment employees
Sudden allocation jumps can hide scope creep; a minority of people can drive the majority of corrections. Both are early warnings that the process is confusing or being gamed. Treat them as coaching opportunities backed by controls.
Scenario: Any anomalies in budget or hours corrections — a maintenance project jumping 28% week-over-week without a matching work order; a pilot line’s hours surging mid-month despite no uptick in scheduling; a single healthcare tech generating 15%+ of hours corrections in a month.
How to prevent this timesheet error
- Set budget thresholds and alert at 75/90/100%.
- Require notes + approval for recodes or mid-period reallocations.
- Track “adjustments per employee”; coach patterns or tighten capture (geofence, kiosk prompts, photo verification).
Getting ahead of errors in employee timesheets
Catching mistakes at payroll is too late. You’re reconciling history instead of steering outcomes.
Start by deciding what your system will own and what it won’t. Know exactly what your time tracking software does (and doesn’t) cover and document how you’ll handle the gaps. Do the same for overtime: plan for every form of OT you allow, how it’s surfaced to managers in advance, and how approvals flow when it’s unavoidable.
From there, make accuracy the default:
- Codify pay, break, and rounding rules once; let the system apply them consistently.
- Connect time with scheduling and payroll so you prevent issues upstream, not clean them up later.
- Run lightweight weekly audits (missed punches, post-approval edits, outliers) and coach patterns, not people.
Get those pieces in place and timesheets stop being a Friday fire drill. However, timesheets — as we’ve seen in this article — have their limitations. A dedicated time tracking solution, on the other hand, doesn’t work in a silo. Instead, it’s built to enforce your rules and integrate with the rest of your stack.
If you’re ready to move from patching timesheet errors to preventing them in the first place, the next step is considering the switch to a time and attendance software.
TCP Software’s employee scheduling and time and attendance solutions have the flexibility and scalability to suit your business and your employees, now and as you grow.
From TimeClock Plus, which automates even the most complex payroll calculations and leave management requests, to Humanity Schedule for dynamic employee scheduling that saves you time and money, we have everything you need to meet your organization’s needs, no matter how unique. Plus, with Aladtec, we offer 24/7 public safety scheduling solutions for your hometown heroes.
Ready to learn how TCP Software takes the pain out of employee scheduling and time tracking? Speak with an expert today.
