Time Entry

Each time entry attaches to the work it actually supported — a customer's case, a specific service code, the program it advanced, the customer or event it served. For paid time that doesn't tie to a specific person or case — holidays, bereavement, training, administrative work — organization-defined categories cover the rest. The classification is the data: when a grant report needs Personnel hours by program, the system already has the answer because every entry was logged against its actual context, not against a generic timesheet bucket.

Your organization picks a pay period type once, and every staff member and volunteer follows the same cycle. Weekly runs Sunday through Saturday. Bi-weekly runs Sunday through Saturday on a two-week cycle, anchored to a configured begin date. Semi-monthly splits each month into 1st–15th and 16th–end-of-month periods. The choice matches how your payroll provider already runs; the platform doesn't ask you to invent a new cadence.

Every period is in one of three states. Open: time is being logged; nothing locked. Submitted: the period owner submitted with a required note, entries are locked from edit by the owner, awaiting approval. Approved: signed off by an authorized approver, also with a required note, locked for payroll. Reopening an approved period is allowed for post-approval corrections — it returns to Open for edit and goes back through approval. Every transition is recorded with the actor, the timestamp, and the note explaining why.

Time approvers are configured on each staff member's record — you assign which staff members someone is authorized to approve, not the other way around. An approver isn't just a sign-off button; they can edit the entries directly from the approval view when they spot a missed lunch or a wrong category, then approve the corrected period. The dual permission — Approve Staff Time Periods and Approve Volunteer Time Periods — is intentionally separate, so a program director who approves their volunteer team's hours doesn't automatically inherit authority over paid staff timesheets.

This is where time entry stops being administrative and starts being financial. An approved staff time entry can be linked to a grant's Personnel or Fringe budget line as an expenditure — same data, no re-entry, with the approval acting as the audit gate. Approved volunteer time always counts as a matching contribution when the receiving grant has a match requirement. The grant's books are built from the same hours your payroll uses; when a funder asks "show me the timesheet behind this expenditure," the answer is in the platform.

The approval interface handles staff and volunteer time in a single screen with two tabs. Approvers with both permissions move between tabs without context-switching to a different module. Each tab supports filtering by staff member or status, navigating period-by-period through the cycle, and editing entries before approval. The two populations follow the same lifecycle on the same engine, and the UI reflects that.

Logging time works fine on a phone — staff can capture hours from the field, between sessions, between visits. But the period detail view, where every individual entry is reviewable in a single scroll, is a desktop experience. The platform tells mobile users to switch devices for detail review rather than rendering a cramped version of the screen the work needs. Submission and approval actions still work on mobile through the period summary; just the row-level detail walk-through is desktop-only.

Not every paid hour ties to a customer, case, or program. Holidays, bereavement, paid training, administrative work, internal meetings — each organization defines its own list of categories at the start, and the categories appear as time entry options alongside the case-and-program targets. Deactivating a category hides it from new entries while preserving every historical hour logged under it. The list is yours to shape; the audit trail is permanent.

Time Entry isn't a silo. Hours roll up into the staff member or volunteer's record on Staff Members and Volunteers. Approved hours can be exported for payroll processing, linked to a grant on the Grants page, or pulled into reports under Reports. The entry itself is the source; everything that needs hours reads from there.