Law firm timesheet software people will actually fill in

Time is entered as start and end blocks against a matter and a task, laid out across the seven days of the week, because that is how people reconstruct one. A form that demands a single entry at a time, each with its own save, is the most reliable way to make a fee earner postpone timekeeping until Friday and then until never.

• Overlaps are refused at entry. Two entries covering the same clock time are flagged where they are typed.
• Late entries stay visible. Nothing is hidden and nothing is auto-corrected; the supervisor can see what was recorded when.
• Reminders run on your schedule. A job chases missing time at a time the firm sets, not at a time somebody in another country decided was reasonable.

Approval exists for one reason: to draw a line between what somebody typed and what the firm is prepared to charge for. Once an entry is approved it is locked, and only locked entries are visible to billing.

That boundary is enforced in the software rather than in a procedure note. It is also the fix for a specific failure the previous system had — bills that occasionally picked up entries from an earlier period, because nothing prevented it. Here the period selection and the approval state are both part of what makes an entry eligible, and both are tested.

Who sees what

Recording, approving and viewing others’ time are separate permissions. A supervisor approving a team’s week, a partner reviewing a matter, and an associate seeing only their own entries are three different grants of the same module.

Firms coming from spreadsheets usually notice three things quickly. Someone stops spending a week a month consolidating sheets. The question "what is August worth" gets answered on the 1st of September instead of the 10th. And the arguments about whether a matter is profitable become arguments about numbers everyone can see, which is a much shorter kind of argument.