What’s the Optimal Timesheet Frequency: Daily, Weekly or Monthly?

Ask anyone who’s required to track time for work what they think about the frequency of their timesheets. They’ll say “too often”, even if it’s once a month. That’s because time flies between recurring dreadful tasks like project timesheets or dental checkups.

It’s the same across industries. Whether it’s law firms, marketing agencies, or tax consultancies – people are notoriously bad at submitting their hours on time. PMs know that and all too often succumb to the pushback, dropping the frequency of timesheets to appease their teams.

‍The kicker is that the more time passes between timesheets, the less accurate project data becomes. That’s because the longer people wait to log their hours on tasks, the less they remember.

On the other hand, you risk alienating colleagues if you increase the frequency of timesheets. They’ll feel pressured into a useless admin task they’re not even rewarded for. So how do you find balance and figure out the optimal frequency of timesheets for your team?

In this article, we’re going to examine the frequency of timesheets based on research. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each time period and figure out the optimal frequency for you.

Timesheet frequency vs accuracy

It’s a universal human experience to remember less as more time passes. This is true for all life events, including meaningful personal milestones. Now, think about the blur or work hours full of interruptions, context switching, and multitasking. Think about working on multiple projects at once, catering to multiple clients.

How much can you remember at the end of the day? How much can you remember 2 days later? It’s one thing to remember that you worked on X and Y projects but another thing to log accurate times on individual tasks, providing descriptions and maybe even syncing that data to invoices.

There’s a direct correlation between timesheet frequency and accuracy. The more frequently you note down what you worked on and for how long, the more reliable these notes are. If you’re able to also populate your timesheet with this information, you’re likely to end up with accurate, reliable project data.

Does this mean you need to log time every time you switch between tasks? Not necessarily, as it depends on your time tracking method. As long as you trust your records and don’t round up hours or make estimates, you’re free to choose any frequency of timesheets you like. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Daily timesheets

‍Best for: hourly billing, best accuracy of data.

Accuracy: 67-95% (manual vs automatic tools).

If you log hours on projects daily, you’ve either made time tracking your core business value or bill clients for hours worked and don’t want to miss out on any potential earnings. Or you're using manual time tracking methods like note taking or start/stop timers. The sheer amount of notes collected by EOD is too much to let them pile up.

If you’re serious about optimizing your productivity, you may even be using a daily activity log template or any Google spreadsheet template designed for recording your daily work. Whether or not you then sync your time entries into project software or populate invoices for clients will depend on your billing model.

Weekly timesheets

Best for: flat rate billing, value-based billing.

Accuracy: 36-95% (manual vs automatic tools).

Weekly timesheets are common in the professional service industry. As more and more service providers charge a flat rate or offer value-based pricing instead of billing by the hour, timesheets are often submitted every Friday.

As opposed to making the effort to recover every billable minute with daily timesheets, weekly timesheets are about analyzing billable utilization and making sense of your pricing strategy. Service providers need to make sure their rates make sense given the actual time investment made into clients.

With automatic time tracking, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter how much time has passed because all of your data is stored indefinitely on your computer. You can go back to any day in the past and see a detailed breakdown of your activities.

Bi-weekly timesheets

Best for: capacity planning, payroll.

Accuracy: 20-95% (manual vs automatic tools).

Bi-weekly timesheets are most often used by service providers who either need to calculate payroll and process payments on their bi-weekly schedule – or those who want to optimize and better plan resources for projects.

Especially working with long-term projects for multiple clients, it’s crucial to have insight into whether milestones are reached as planned. Then service businesses can adjust their resources and increase or decrease capacity to remain profitable.

As for the accuracy of bi-weekly timesheets, you can imagine what happens if you only rely on memory or random notes you made in the past 2 weeks. Another downside here is the sheer amount of time it takes to come up with project hours or go through emails or calendar appointments to try and recover time worked.

Monthly timesheets

Best for: salaried employees, budgeting.

Accuracy: 10-95% (manual vs automatic tools).

Monthly timesheets are used either for payroll of salaried employees or for budgeting purposes. Either way, the quality of data in these timesheets varies tremendously based on how time is tracked.

For payroll of salaried employees, 90% of logged times being assigned to the wrong project doesn’t seem to be a big deal. As long as work hours are compensated for, everyone is happy. However, for insight into project profitability and for actually analyzing and comparing projects and clients, monthly timesheets with manual tools are detrimental.

Even with automatic time tracking, logging a month’s worth of tasks into your timesheet can easily take up half a day to a day, especially if you switch between projects a lot. If you provide professional services like software development and require employees to submit timesheets once a month, you’re wasting their time.

Which timesheet frequency is the best?

As we’ve demonstrated several times throughout this article, the quality of timesheets is measured by the accuracy of submitted data. We’ve seen that it’s not so much the frequency of timesheets as it’s the method of time tracking you use.

Meanwhile, automatic time tracking tools like our very own Memtime work with any frequency of timesheets because they don’t rely on human memory. In fact, Memtime not only records everything you do but also keeps this data private to you on your computer indefinitely. Even weeks and months later, you can go back and reconstruct your day minute by minute.

However, seeing how much work can accumulate over the weeks of multitasking, if you want reliable project data, we recommend daily or weekly timesheets with automatic time tracking. We’re seen service businesses optimize their timesheet workflow to 5 minutes a day and 95% accurately assigned time entries.

Try Memtime for daily, weekly, or bi-weekly timesheets

Memtime is free to use for 14 days, no credit card required. You can literally start your trial now and have enough data to populate even a bi-weekly timesheet. You don’t have to do anything other than install Memtime and connect your project software if you use any. The rest is done for you while you focus on project work.

If you wish to start a 100% free team trial for 10 users at a time, book a call with us and we’ll get you started with a free personalized onboarding session.