What Is a Timesheet? A Complete Guide
What is a timesheet? A guide to what timesheets include, the main types, how to fill one out, and the FLSA recordkeeping rules employers follow.
What Is a Timesheet?
A complete guide to tracking, recording, and paying employee hours
The first time I had to run payroll for an hourly employee, I had no idea how many hours she had worked. She had texted me some numbers, I had a vague memory of when she came in, and I was about to pay real money on guesswork. Most employers discover they need a timesheet at exactly that moment, a week or two late.
This guide covers what a timesheet actually is, what belongs on one, the difference between a timesheet and a timecard, the compliance rules most employers have never read, and how to set the whole thing up so it runs with the least possible effort. I build employee records and onboarding into FirstHR because accurate time records start with accurate employee data.
Timesheets sound like the most boring topic in business, and in a sense they are. But they sit directly on top of two things that are not boring at all: paying people correctly, and staying on the right side of federal wage law. Get timesheets wrong and you either underpay your team, overpay out of your own pocket, or leave yourself with no defense when someone disputes their hours.
What Is a Timesheet?
A timesheet is a document that records the amount of time an employee works over a specific period, capturing start and end times, break periods, and total hours worked for each pay period. It is the record that connects the work someone did to the pay they receive.
The format does not change the function. Whether it is a paper form, a spreadsheet, or an entry in a software system, a timesheet turns hours worked into a number you can pay and a record you can defend.
The word covers a wide range of formats. At the simplest end, a timesheet is a piece of paper where an employee writes down when they started and stopped. At the most sophisticated end, it is an automated digital record that captures clock-in and clock-out times, calculates overtime, deducts breaks, and files itself for the legally required retention period.
Both ends of that range are timesheets. They differ only in how much of the work the system does for you and how much a human has to do by hand.
The plural, timesheets, usually refers to the collection of these records across your team and across pay periods. When an owner says they need everyone's timesheets in before Friday, they mean the individual records that together make up a payroll run.
The concept is old. Timesheets descend from the time books and punch cards that factories used in the 19th century to track shift workers, and the underlying purpose, matching hours to pay, has not changed in over a century.
What a Timesheet Includes
A complete timesheet has six core elements. Missing any of them creates either a pay error or a compliance gap. The specific layout varies, but every functional timesheet captures the same information: who worked, when, for how long, and whether the record was approved.
The approval signature is the element most owners underrate. A timesheet without an attestation is just a list of numbers. A timesheet the employee signed, confirming the hours are accurate, is a legal document.
If a former employee later claims they worked unpaid hours, a signed timesheet showing the agreed hours is one of your strongest pieces of evidence. This is why digital systems capture an explicit approval step rather than just recording raw punches.
For businesses that bill clients or track project costs, timesheets often include additional fields: project or client codes, task categories, and billable versus non-billable flags. These turn the timesheet into a source of financial data beyond payroll, letting you see which clients and projects actually consume your team's hours. That analysis matters most for agencies and service businesses, but even a product business benefits from knowing where time goes.
Why Timesheets Matter
Timesheets matter because they sit at the intersection of the two things no employer can afford to get wrong: paying people accurately and complying with wage law. When there is no dedicated payroll team, the timesheet is often the only wage record that exists, which makes it the single point of failure if it is done poorly.
The accuracy problem is immediate. Without a reliable timesheet, you are paying based on memory, texts, and guesswork. Pay too little and you have an underpaid, resentful employee and a potential wage claim. Pay too much and you are eroding already thin margins hour by hour. A structured timesheet removes the guesswork and makes payroll a matter of arithmetic instead of estimation.
The compliance problem is less immediate but more dangerous. Federal law requires employers to keep accurate records of hours worked, and when those records are missing or unreliable, the law generally sides with the employee. The timesheet is the record that protects you, but only if it exists, is accurate, and is kept for the required period.
Timesheet vs Timecard vs Time Clock
These three terms get used interchangeably, but they refer to different things, and the distinction matters when you are choosing how to track time. A timesheet is the record of hours, a timecard is traditionally the physical card that captured raw punches, and a time clock is the device that did the punching. Modern software has blurred these lines, but understanding the original meanings clears up most of the confusion.
| Term | What It Is | Typical Use Today |
|---|---|---|
| Timesheet | A document recording hours worked over a pay period, often with breaks, totals, overtime, and project codes. | The complete record used for payroll and billing, whether paper, spreadsheet, or digital. |
| Timecard | Traditionally a physical card stamped by a time clock with clock-in and clock-out times. | Often used loosely to mean a simple digital record of raw in and out times, without project detail. |
| Time clock | The device or app that records the moment an employee starts and stops work. | A punch-in method (physical clock, kiosk, or mobile app) that feeds data into a timesheet. |
| Time tracking | The overall process and software of capturing, approving, and storing work hours. | The system that combines the clock, the card, and the timesheet into one workflow. |
In practice, the relationship is a pipeline. A time clock captures the punches, those punches populate a timecard or raw time record, and that data rolls up into a timesheet for the pay period. Time tracking is the name for the whole process. When a vendor sells "time tracking software," they are selling a system that handles every step of that pipeline, so you do not have to stitch the pieces together manually.
The practical takeaway is that you do not need to obsess over the terminology. What you need is a reliable way to capture when people start and stop, a way to total those hours correctly, and a way to store the result. Whether you call the result a timesheet or a timecard matters far less than whether it is accurate and retained.
Types of Timesheets
Timesheets are classified three ways: by the pay period they cover, by their purpose, and by their format. Understanding all three helps you pick the right structure, because a single timesheet can be, for example, a weekly billable project timesheet in a spreadsheet. Most confusion about timesheet types comes from mixing these three dimensions, so it helps to take them one at a time.
Types of Timesheets by Pay Period
The most common way to categorize timesheets is by the period they cover, which should align with how often you run payroll. There are five standard periods, from daily to monthly.
Most employers land on weekly or biweekly timesheets because those match the two most common US pay cycles. Whatever the period, overtime is calculated per workweek, not per pay period. An employee who works 45 hours in week one and 35 in week two is owed 5 hours of overtime, not zero, because you cannot average the two weeks.
The per-workweek rule holds on a biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly timesheet too. You look at each workweek separately for non-exempt employees, meaning the staff who are entitled to overtime, which is why longer pay periods make overtime tracking harder rather than easier.
| Pay Period | Sheets Per Year | Overtime Tracking | Typical Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily | Varies | Simple, per day | Project and field work logged as it happens |
| Weekly | 52 | Cleanest, one workweek per sheet | Hourly and shift-based teams |
| Biweekly | 26 | Two workweeks, tracked separately | The US default across most industries |
| Semimonthly | 24 | Harder, workweeks split across sheets | Salaried staff on fixed dates |
| Monthly | 12 | Hardest, long gap between reviews | Salaried teams and retainer contractors |
Industry shifts the mix. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics survey (February 2023) found 65.4% of construction establishments paying weekly, the only major industry group where weekly pay outnumbered biweekly, while leisure and hospitality leaned biweekly at 54.9% against 25.6% weekly (BLS). Match your timesheet to your own payroll cycle, not to the national average.
Types of Timesheets by Purpose
Beyond the pay period, timesheets are named for what they are used to track. The same weekly timesheet can serve different purposes depending on which fields it captures. Each purpose-based timesheet is named for the job it does, so the right one depends on what you need the record to answer.
These purposes are not mutually exclusive. A consulting firm might use a weekly billable project timesheet that also captures PTO, combining three of the types above into one record. The point is to capture the fields that answer your actual questions: what do I pay, what do I bill, and where did the time go.
The most common format by purpose is still a simple payroll timesheet that records daily hours and totals. Billing and job costing change what belongs on the form. If either matters to you, look for a version that captures task or project codes alongside the raw hours, not just a daily total.
Types of Timesheets by Format
The third dimension is the medium: how the timesheet physically exists. A paper timesheet, an Excel or Google Sheets template, and a digital record inside time-tracking software are all valid, and all can hold any of the pay periods and purposes above. The format determines how much manual work the timesheet creates, not what it captures.
The practical way to choose is to work through the three dimensions in order. First, set the pay period to match your payroll cycle. Second, decide the purpose: pure payroll, billing, project costing, or attendance. Third, pick the format based on your team size and how much manual work you are willing to absorb.
The answer differs by business. A small shop with a handful of hourly staff might use a weekly attendance timesheet in a spreadsheet, while a growing agency needs a biweekly billable project timesheet inside software that calculates totals automatically.
How to Fill Out a Timesheet
Filling out a timesheet is straightforward once you know the steps, and getting your team to do it consistently is more of a process challenge than a technical one. The goal is an accurate record of hours worked that both the employee and manager agree on. Here is the standard process, whether you are using paper, a spreadsheet, or software.
The hardest part of this process is not the arithmetic. It is getting every employee to submit an accurate, complete timesheet on time, every pay period, without you having to chase them. Late and missing timesheets are the single biggest operational headache in manual time tracking. This is where automation earns its keep: a system that reminds employees, flags missing entries, and calculates totals removes the weekly chase entirely.
How to Calculate Hours on a Timesheet
Calculating hours on a timesheet means converting start and end times into a total, subtracting unpaid breaks, and expressing the result in a format payroll can use. The math is simple in principle but trips up almost everyone, because clock times are in hours and minutes while payroll runs on decimal hours. Getting this conversion right is the difference between accurate pay and hundreds of small errors across a year.
The basic calculation has three steps. First, find the elapsed time between the start and the end of the shift. Second, subtract any unpaid break time. Third, convert the result from hours and minutes into decimal hours for payroll. An employee who starts at 9:00, ends at 17:30, and takes a 30-minute unpaid lunch worked 8 hours: 8.5 hours elapsed, minus 0.5 hours of break, equals 8.0 hours.
Converting Minutes to Decimal Hours
The step that causes the most errors is converting minutes into decimals. Payroll systems calculate pay as rate multiplied by decimal hours, so 8 hours and 15 minutes must become 8.25, not 8.15. The conversion is simple: divide the minutes by 60, so 15 minutes divided by 60 is 0.25. This table covers the common conversions so you do not have to recalculate them every pay period.
The error to avoid is treating minutes as if they were already decimals. Writing 8.30 for 8 hours and 30 minutes underpays, because 30 minutes is 0.50, not 0.30. Writing 8.15 for 8 hours and 15 minutes underpays too, because 15 minutes is 0.25. Over a two-week period across a full team, these small conversion errors add up to real money, and they are exactly the kind of mistake that automated calculation eliminates.
Calculating Overtime Hours
Once you have accurate decimal totals for each workweek, overtime is the hours over 40 in that workweek, paid at one and a half times the regular rate. An employee who worked 46 hours in a workweek has 40 regular hours and 6 overtime hours, so the overtime pay is 6 multiplied by 1.5 multiplied by the hourly rate.
The per-workweek rule is not optional. On a biweekly timesheet you calculate overtime for each of the two weeks separately, never on the 80-hour total, and the Department of Labor's overtime pay fact sheet states that averaging hours across two or more weeks is not permitted.
Some states add daily overtime rules on top of the federal weekly rule. California pays one and a half times the regular rate for hours over 8 up to and including 12 in a single day, and double the regular rate past 12 hours in a day, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.
Daily rules change what the form has to capture. Your timesheet needs daily hours, not just weekly totals, to apply them correctly, while the federal weekly overtime test still runs on each individual workweek.
How to Calculate Work Hours and Pay
To calculate work hours and pay, total the decimal hours for each workweek, split them into regular and overtime, and multiply each block by its own rate. Regular hours are paid at the base rate. Overtime hours, meaning anything past 40 in that workweek for a non-exempt employee, are paid at one and a half times that rate.
Take someone at $22 an hour who logs 46.5 hours in a workweek. That is 40 regular hours at $22, which comes to $880, plus 6.5 overtime hours at $33, which comes to $214.50. Gross pay for that week is $1,094.50. Run the same arithmetic for each workweek in the period, then add the weeks together.
Two things break this more often than the multiplication does. Bonuses and shift differentials usually have to be folded into the regular rate first, because the Department of Labor treats all compensation for hours worked as part of that rate, which makes the overtime rate higher than the posted wage. And the timesheet produces gross pay only: payroll deductions come after.
The regular rate is where small payments cause large errors. The Department of Labor's regular rate fact sheet defines it as total compensation for the workweek divided by total hours worked, and lists the payments that stay out of that calculation.
Timesheet Rounding Rules
Timesheet rounding is the practice of adjusting clock-in and clock-out times to set increments, usually the nearest 5, 6, or 15 minutes, rather than paying to the exact minute. Rounding is legal under federal law, but only when it is applied neutrally so that it does not systematically favor the employer over time. Rounding that consistently shortchanges employees is a wage violation.
The most common rounding method is to the nearest quarter hour, known as the 7-minute rule. The federal rounding regulation, 29 CFR 785.48(b), lets an employer record starting and stopping times to the nearest 5 minutes, one-tenth of an hour, or quarter hour, as long as the practice does not, over a period of time, fail to pay employees for all the time they actually worked.
The bands come from the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #53: time from 1 to 7 minutes may be rounded down, and time from 8 to 14 minutes must be rounded up and counted as a quarter hour. Clocking in at 9:07 rounds down to 9:00, while 9:08 rounds up to 9:15.
| Clock-In Time | Rounds To | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 to 9:07 | 9:00 | Down (favors employee) |
| 9:08 to 9:14 | 9:15 | Up (favors employer) |
| 9:15 to 9:22 | 9:15 | Down (favors employee) |
| 9:23 to 9:29 | 9:30 | Up (favors employer) |
The bands are symmetric, rounding down as often as they round up, which is what keeps the method neutral. The legal risk with rounding is not the practice itself but applying it in a way that only ever benefits the employer. Always rounding hours down, rounding only clock-ins but not clock-outs, or setting rules that mathematically favor the company creates liability for unpaid wages.
Several states, most notably California, have grown increasingly hostile to rounding altogether, with courts favoring exact-time tracking. The California Supreme Court held in Donohue v. AMN Services (2021) that employers may not round time punches for meal periods.
When Are Timesheets Due?
Timesheets are due whenever you set the deadline, and the practical rule is one to three business days before payroll runs. No federal law fixes the date. That gap is what gives managers room to review, employees room to fix an error, and whoever runs payroll room to process without rushing.
Anchor the deadline to the end of the pay period rather than to payday. On a weekly cycle that usually means the close of the last scheduled day, or first thing the next morning. On a biweekly cycle it is the end of the second workweek. Semimonthly and monthly cycles apply the same rule to their own period end date.
Late timesheets still get paid. Wages required by the FLSA are due on the regular payday for the pay period covered, according to the Department of Labor's handy reference guide to the FLSA, whether or not the paperwork arrived on time.
The deadline is an operational rule, not a condition of payment. Put it in the policy, send an automatic reminder a day out, and treat repeat lateness as a performance conversation.
The Approval Workflow
The timesheet approval workflow is the sequence of steps a timesheet moves through from the employee recording their hours to the record being retained after payroll. A clear approval process is what turns raw time data into a defensible wage record. Without defined approval, timesheets get processed unchecked, errors slip through, and no one has verified that the hours are accurate before money changes hands.
The manager approval step is the control point that catches problems before they become paychecks. A manager reviewing a timesheet should check four things: do the hours match the known schedule, is any overtime expected and authorized, are the break deductions correct, and does anything look unusual. This review takes minutes when the data is clean and saves hours of correction when it catches an error before payroll runs.
The approval workflow also creates accountability. When an employee submits and attests to their hours, and a manager reviews and approves them, you have two people confirming the record is accurate. That shared confirmation is far stronger evidence in a dispute than a number that appeared in a spreadsheet with no trail of who entered or approved it.
The workflow does not have to be manual. Building it into a system, with automatic reminders and a clear approval step, removes the chasing while strengthening the record.
Timesheets and FLSA Compliance
For non-exempt employees, timesheets are how you meet the recordkeeping requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law that governs minimum wage and overtime. The FLSA does not mandate a specific form, but it does require that employers keep accurate records of hours worked, and the timesheet is how most businesses satisfy that requirement.
The core rule is that non-exempt employees must have their hours tracked, because they are entitled to overtime pay at one and a half times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek. Without a timesheet, you have no way to calculate overtime correctly and no record proving you paid it.
The Department of Labor requires accurate records of hours worked for every non-exempt employee, and prescribes no particular form for them. That makes the exempt versus non-exempt distinction fundamental: an employee you wrongly treat as exempt is still owed overtime, including for hours no record ever captured.
Part-time status changes nothing here. The Department of Labor notes that the FLSA does not address part-time employment and leaves that classification to the employer (DOL), so a non-exempt part-timer's hours get recorded exactly like anyone else's. Their hours often vary week to week, which makes an accurate record more useful, not less.
Exempt status has a salary floor. The white-collar exemption requires a salary of not less than $684 a week on top of the job duties tests, per the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #17A, which works out to $35,568 across a full year. Anyone paid below that level is non-exempt and needs hours tracked.
The FLSA also treats missing records as an employer problem, not an employee problem. If a wage dispute reaches the Department of Labor or a court and you cannot produce time records, the employee's reasonable estimate of their hours generally prevails. This is the opposite of how most owners assume it works.
The burden-shifting rule dates to Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. (1946), where the Supreme Court held that an employee who shows the work performed and enough evidence for a just and reasonable inference of its extent shifts the burden to the employer. The absence of a timesheet does not protect you. It exposes you.
State law adds another layer. Many states have their own overtime rules, meal and rest break requirements, and recordkeeping standards that go beyond the federal baseline. California's daily overtime rule, for example, requires hours over 8 in a single day to be paid at overtime even if the weekly total is under 40. Your timesheet needs to capture enough detail to satisfy whichever rules apply where your employees work.
How Long to Keep Timesheets
Timesheets are legal records, and federal law sets minimum retention periods. Deleting them after payroll runs is a compliance mistake that leaves you defenseless in a dispute or audit. The rules are specific about how long different records must be kept.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers must keep payroll records for at least three years, a period the Department of Labor sets out in its recordkeeping fact sheet. Records used to compute pay, which include time cards, wage rate tables, and work schedules, must be kept for at least two years.
The regulation behind that two-year rule, 29 CFR 516.6, names the basic time and earning cards or sheets on which daily starting and stopping times are entered. Because timesheets fall into that category but often support the three-year payroll records, most businesses keep them for at least three years, and often longer.
| Record Type | Federal Minimum Retention | Practical Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Payroll records | 3 years (FLSA) | 3 to 4 years, longer if state law requires |
| Timesheets and time cards | 2 years (FLSA, records used to compute pay) | 3 years to align with payroll records |
| Work and time schedules | 2 years (FLSA) | 3 years for consistency |
| Records after a dispute or claim | Varies | Keep indefinitely while any dispute is active |
Several states impose longer retention periods, so the safe approach is to keep timesheets for at least three to four years and to check your state's specific requirement. The cost of storing digital timesheets is essentially zero, while the cost of missing records in a wage claim can run into thousands of dollars per employee. This asymmetry is why many businesses simply keep time records indefinitely once they go digital.
Paper vs Digital Timesheets
Timesheets can be paper forms, spreadsheets, or digital records inside software, and the right choice depends mostly on your team size and how much manual work you are willing to absorb each pay period. All three are legally valid. They differ in how much time and error they introduce.
| Method | Best For | Main Drawback |
|---|---|---|
| Paper timesheets | Very small teams, single location, simple schedules | Manual totaling, easy to lose, no automatic retention, illegible entries |
| Spreadsheet templates | Small teams comfortable with formulas | Someone must collect, check, and consolidate every timesheet; formula errors; no reminders |
| Digital time tracking | Growing teams, multiple locations, remote or hourly staff | Requires choosing and setting up a system; small learning curve |
The honest tradeoff is this. Paper and spreadsheet timesheets cost nothing to start but cost real time every pay period, and they scale badly. Every additional employee adds collection, checking, and consolidation work that falls on the owner or office manager. Digital timesheets cost a small monthly fee but eliminate the collection chase, calculate totals and overtime automatically, and retain records without anyone thinking about it.
The tipping point usually arrives when the person collecting timesheets starts spending more than an hour per pay period on the process, or when the team grows past a size where a single spreadsheet stays manageable. At that point the monthly software cost is easily justified by the time recovered and the errors avoided.
The timesheet rarely lives alone. In most organizations it sits inside a broader HR system, which is where employee records, onboarding, and time tracking naturally connect.
Timesheets for Different Work Types
Timesheets for remote and hybrid teams solve a specific problem: you cannot see when a remote employee starts and stops work, so the timesheet becomes the only record of their hours. This makes accurate self-reported time tracking more important for remote teams than for on-site ones, where physical presence provides a rough check. For non-exempt remote employees, the same FLSA rules apply regardless of where the work happens.
The core challenge is trust combined with compliance. Remote non-exempt employees are still owed overtime, still need accurate hour tracking, and still need break compliance, but there is no one watching the clock.
The solution is not surveillance, which damages trust and rarely improves accuracy. It is a simple, low-friction way for employees to record their own hours, combined with clear expectations about what counts as work time and when overtime needs approval.
Hybrid teams add a wrinkle: the same employee might work from the office some days and home others, and the timesheet needs to capture hours consistently across both. A system that lets employees clock in from a phone or laptop wherever they are removes the friction of different tracking methods for different locations.
Project and Billable Time Tracking
Project and billable time tracking uses timesheets to answer a question beyond payroll: where did the time go, and how much of it can be billed to clients. For service businesses, this turns the timesheet from a pay document into a profitability tool. Every hour logged against a project or client becomes data for invoicing, job costing, and understanding which work actually makes money.
Billable time tracking separates hours into billable and non-billable categories. Billable hours are the work you can invoice a client for: the actual project work. Non-billable hours are internal work: administration, business development, and training.
Billable hours as a share of total hours, called utilization, is the key metric for any business that sells time. A consultant billing 30 hours out of a 40-hour week has 75% utilization, and that number directly drives revenue.
| Metric | What It Measures | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Billable hours | Hours that can be invoiced to a client | Direct revenue input for service businesses |
| Non-billable hours | Internal, admin, and business development time | Necessary overhead that reduces capacity |
| Utilization rate | Billable hours as a percentage of total hours | The core profitability metric for time-based businesses |
| Realization rate | Hours billed versus hours actually invoiced and paid | Reveals scope creep and under-billing |
Project timesheets also enable job costing: knowing exactly how much labor a project consumed so you can tell whether it was profitable. A project that took 200 hours when you quoted 120 lost money, and without project time tracking you would never know which projects are draining your margin.
That data compounds into better estimates and smarter pricing. For businesses where labor is the main cost, project time tracking is often more valuable than the payroll function of the timesheet.
Timesheets by Industry
While the fundamentals of timesheets are the same everywhere, different industries have specific requirements that shape what their timesheets need to capture. A construction timesheet and a consulting timesheet track the same underlying thing, hours worked, but the fields, compliance rules, and analysis differ significantly. Understanding your industry's specific needs helps you choose the right timesheet structure.
The common thread is that industry-specific requirements usually come from two sources: how the work is structured, and what compliance rules apply. Construction adds job costing and prevailing wage certified payroll. Healthcare adds shift differentials and strict break compliance. Restaurants add tipped-wage and tip-credit tracking. Professional services add billable-hour and utilization analysis. Retail adds predictive scheduling compliance in some jurisdictions.
When choosing how to track time, start from your industry's specific needs rather than a generic template. A restaurant that ignores tipped-wage tracking or a construction company that skips job costing is missing the fields that matter most for their compliance and profitability. The right timesheet captures what your specific business needs to pay people correctly, bill clients accurately, and stay compliant with the rules that apply to your work.
Timesheet Fraud and Time Theft
Time theft is any practice where employees are paid for time they did not actually work, whether through padding hours, taking unrecorded breaks, or clocking in for absent coworkers. Timesheets are both where time theft happens and where it gets caught. Understanding the common forms helps you design a process that prevents them without treating your whole team like suspects.
The most notorious form is buddy punching, where one employee clocks in or out for another. It is common with physical time clocks and shared logins, and it is the main reason biometric verification, photo capture at clock-in, and individual mobile clock-ins exist. When each person can only clock themselves in from their own device, buddy punching becomes difficult.
The right response to time theft is prevention through good systems, not suspicion of individuals. Accurate clock-in methods that tie time to a specific person, break tracking that records actual break length, approval workflows that catch anomalies, and clear policies about what counts as work time all reduce time theft structurally.
A manager who reviews timesheets against known schedules catches most padding without needing to accuse anyone. The goal is a process where honest recording is the path of least resistance.
Software, Payroll, and Reporting
Timesheet software automates the collection, calculation, approval, and retention of employee hours, replacing the manual work of paper or spreadsheet tracking. Choosing the right system means matching its capabilities to your actual needs rather than buying the most feature-rich option. For most organizations, the timesheet is one function within a broader HR system, not a standalone tool.
The core capabilities that matter for most businesses are straightforward. Employees should be able to clock in and out or enter hours easily, from wherever they work. The system should calculate totals and overtime automatically, applying the per-workweek rule correctly. Managers should have a clear approval step. Records should be retained automatically for the required period. And the timesheet data should flow into payroll without manual re-entry.
| Capability | What to Look For | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of clock-in | Mobile, web, or kiosk entry that employees actually use | A system people avoid produces worse data than paper |
| Automatic calculation | Totals, decimal conversion, and per-workweek overtime | Eliminates the most common source of pay errors |
| Approval workflow | Clear manager review and approval step | Creates the control point and the defensible record |
| Record retention | Automatic storage for the required period | Meets FLSA recordkeeping without manual filing |
| Payroll connection | Approved hours flow into payroll without re-entry | Removes double data entry and its errors |
| HR integration | Time tracking connected to employee records and onboarding | Avoids a fragmented stack of disconnected tools |
The most important evaluation question is whether the timesheet function connects to the rest of your people operations. A standalone time-tracking app that does not talk to your employee records, onboarding, or payroll creates islands of data and duplicate entry.
A timesheet built into your HR system means a new hire is set up for time tracking as part of onboarding, their hours flow to payroll automatically, and their records live alongside everything else.
How Timesheets Connect to Payroll
Timesheets are the input to payroll: the approved hours on a timesheet become the hours payroll multiplies by pay rates to produce paychecks. This connection is where timesheet accuracy translates directly into pay accuracy, and where the handoff between the two functions most often breaks down. A perfect timesheet is worthless if the hours are re-entered incorrectly into payroll, and a broken handoff is a common source of pay errors.
In a manual process, the connection is a person reading numbers off timesheets and typing them into payroll. Every re-entry is a chance for error: a transposed digit, a missed overtime flag, a timesheet that never got collected. In an integrated system, approved timesheet hours flow directly into payroll with no re-entry, which removes the transcription errors entirely and cuts the time payroll takes.
The sequence matters. Timesheets must be submitted, reviewed, and approved before payroll runs, which is why the submission deadline exists. When timesheets come in late, payroll either gets rushed to meet a payday that cannot move or runs on estimated hours that later need correcting.
A clean process has three parts: clear deadlines, an approval step that finishes before the payroll cutoff, and a direct connection between approved hours and the payroll calculation. Setting this up for new employees during onboarding prevents the first-paycheck errors that damage new-hire trust.
What Timesheets Reveal Beyond Payroll
Beyond calculating pay, timesheets are a rich source of data about how your business actually operates. The hours your team logs reveal patterns that are invisible without the data: which projects consume the most labor, where overtime concentrates, how capacity is used, and whether your estimates match reality. Reading timesheet data as management information, not just payroll input, turns a compliance chore into a decision-making tool.
A few patterns are worth watching. Persistent overtime in one area signals either understaffing or a process problem, both of which cost money. Low utilization in a service business means capacity is going unbilled. Projects that consistently run over their estimated hours reveal pricing or scoping problems.
A steady creep in total hours without a matching increase in output can be an early sign of inefficiency. None of these patterns show up in a single timesheet, but they emerge clearly when you look at the data across time.
| Pattern | What It Might Reveal | Action to Consider |
|---|---|---|
| Persistent overtime in one team | Understaffing or an inefficient process | Hire, redistribute work, or fix the bottleneck |
| Low billable utilization | Capacity going unbilled or too much admin | Rebalance work or investigate non-billable time |
| Projects over estimated hours | Pricing or scoping problems | Adjust estimates and pricing on future work |
| Rising hours, flat output | Declining efficiency or scope creep | Investigate process or workload changes |
This is why timesheet data is worth capturing accurately even for salaried teams who are not paid by the hour. The hours reveal how the business spends its most valuable resource, and that visibility informs hiring, pricing, and process decisions.
Best Practices, Policy, and Templates
Timesheet best practices are the habits that keep time records accurate, compliant, and useful with the least ongoing effort. Most timesheet problems come from skipping one of these fundamentals, not from anything complicated. Adopting them turns time tracking from a recurring headache into a reliable background process.
The unifying principle behind all of these is that a timesheet is a legal record that also happens to be useful management data. Treating it casually creates both compliance risk and blind spots.
Treating the timesheet seriously, with real-time entry, clear deadlines, proper approval, and automatic retention, produces accurate pay, a defensible record, and visibility into how your business uses time. None of these practices are difficult. They just require a process that enforces them consistently rather than relying on memory and good intentions.
What to Include in a Timesheet Policy
A timesheet policy is a written document that defines how your organization tracks time: who must submit timesheets, how, by when, and what happens if the rules are not followed. Having a clear policy matters because it sets expectations, ensures consistency, and provides a documented standard that protects you if a time record is ever disputed. Without a policy, time tracking depends on informal habits that vary by person and break down under pressure.
A complete timesheet policy covers eight elements. Each one closes a gap that, left unaddressed, becomes a source of confusion or dispute.
The most important element is often the one businesses skip: a clear statement that falsifying a timesheet is a serious violation. Because timesheets are legal wage records, inaccurate reporting is not a minor administrative issue. Stating this explicitly in the policy sets the right expectation and gives you clear grounds to act if time theft occurs. A written timesheet policy fits naturally into your broader employee handbook.
Timesheet Errors and Corrections
Timesheet errors are inevitable, and how you handle corrections determines whether a small mistake becomes a compliance problem. The rule is simple: never silently edit a timesheet. Every correction should be documented, showing what changed, who changed it, and why. A time record edited without a trail loses its credibility as a legal document, which is exactly when you need it to hold up.
Common errors include a forgotten clock-out, a missed break entry, hours logged to the wrong day, or a simple calculation mistake. Each of these is fixable, but the fix must preserve the integrity of the record.
The correct approach is to make the correction, note the original value and the reason for the change, and have both the employee and manager confirm the corrected version. That keeps the record accurate while documenting that the change was legitimate.
The form below is what that documentation looks like in practice: one record per correction, filled in when the change is made and filed with the timesheet it changes.
The workweek section is the one people skip and the one that matters most, because a correction that pushes a week past 40 hours changes what you owe, not just what you record. The pattern check at the end is what turns a stack of these forms into a process fix instead of a filing habit.
The deeper issue with corrections is what they reveal about your process. Frequent errors of the same type point to a systemic problem: unclear instructions, a confusing form, or a submission process that encourages last-minute reconstruction. When you find yourself making the same correction repeatedly, fix the process rather than just the individual entries.
Timesheet Templates and What They Should Include
A timesheet template is a reusable form, printable or in a spreadsheet, that structures how employees record their hours. A good template captures everything needed for accurate pay and compliance without being so complex that people avoid filling it out. Whether you use a template or software, the same core fields need to be present for the record to be complete.
Every functional timesheet template includes the employee name and identifying information, the pay period dates, a row for each day with start time, end time, and break duration, a daily total, a weekly total, a space to flag overtime, and signature lines for both employee and manager.
Templates for specific purposes add fields: a project template adds project and task codes, a billable template adds billable and non-billable columns, and a PTO template adds leave categories.
| Template Type | Core Fields | Added Fields |
|---|---|---|
| Basic payroll timesheet | Name, dates, daily start/end, breaks, totals, signatures | None beyond the essentials |
| Project timesheet | All core fields | Project name, task code, hours per project |
| Billable timesheet | All core fields | Client, billable/non-billable flag, billing rate |
| PTO and leave timesheet | All core fields | Leave type, PTO hours, sick and holiday columns |
| Overtime timesheet | All core fields | Regular vs overtime hours, authorization field |
The tradeoff with templates is that they are free and simple to start but create ongoing manual work. Someone still has to collect every template, check it, total it, transfer the numbers to payroll, and file it for retention. A template solves the format problem but not the process problem.
The process problem is why most businesses eventually move from templates to a system where the template is built in and the collection, calculation, and retention happen automatically.
Timesheet vs Time Tracking and History
The timesheet has a longer history than most people realize, and understanding where it came from clarifies why it works the way it does. Timesheets descend from the time books of the 19th century, when factories and workshops first needed to track the hours of large numbers of shift workers to calculate pay. These handwritten ledgers were the original timesheets, recording when each worker arrived and left.
The mechanical time clock, patented in the late 19th century, automated the recording of clock-in and clock-out times. Workers inserted a card, and the machine stamped the time, creating the physical timecard. This was a major advance because it removed the reliance on memory and manual recording, producing an objective record of when work started and stopped. The punch clock and its timecards dominated timekeeping for most of the 20th century.
The shift to digital timesheets began as computers entered the workplace, replacing physical cards with electronic records. The modern era of cloud-based, mobile time tracking is the latest step in the same evolution: the underlying purpose, matching hours to pay accurately, has not changed since the 19th-century time book.
What has changed is how much of the work is automated. Each advance, from the time book to the punch clock to digital software, removed manual effort and error while keeping the core function intact.
Timesheet vs Time Tracking
A timesheet is the record of hours worked, while time tracking is the broader process and technology of capturing, approving, and storing those hours. The timesheet is the output; time tracking is the system that produces it. This distinction matters when evaluating tools, because a timesheet is one component of a complete time-tracking system, not the whole thing.
Time tracking encompasses everything around the timesheet: the method employees use to clock in, the automatic calculation of totals and overtime, the approval workflow, the connection to payroll, and the retention of records.
A timesheet without a time-tracking system is just a form that someone has to fill out, collect, check, and file by hand. A time-tracking system turns the timesheet into an automated process where the record largely creates and maintains itself.
| Aspect | Timesheet | Time Tracking |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The record of hours worked | The full process and system of capturing hours |
| Scope | A single document per employee per period | Clock-in, calculation, approval, payroll, retention |
| Effort | Someone must collect, check, and file it | The system automates collection and processing |
| Output | The timesheet is the end product | The timesheet is one output among several |
For most businesses, the practical decision is not whether to use timesheets, which you need for pay and compliance, but whether to use a time-tracking system that automates the work around them. The timesheet is unavoidable. The manual labor of managing timesheets is optional, and eliminating it is what modern time-tracking software is for.
The Benefits of Using Timesheets
The benefits of timesheets go well beyond calculating pay. A good time-tracking process delivers accurate payroll, legal compliance, better project profitability, and management visibility all from the same underlying data. Understanding the full range of benefits helps justify the effort of setting up a proper system rather than muddling through with guesswork and memory.
The most direct benefit is payroll accuracy. Timesheets replace estimation with exact records, so you pay people for the hours they actually worked, no more and no less. This protects your margins from overpayment and protects your team from underpayment, and it removes the friction that inaccurate pay creates. For hourly and non-exempt staff, accurate timesheets are the foundation of correct pay.
The second benefit is legal protection. Accurate, retained timesheets are your primary defense in any wage dispute or Department of Labor audit. Because the law puts the recordkeeping burden on the employer, having complete time records is what stands between a minor disagreement and a costly claim. A business with clean timesheets can demonstrate exactly what each employee worked and was paid, which resolves most disputes before they escalate.
The third benefit is business intelligence. Timesheets reveal where labor goes: which projects consume the most hours, where overtime concentrates, how billable capacity is used, and whether estimates match reality. This data, invisible without accurate time tracking, informs pricing, hiring, and process decisions.
The fourth benefit is simply time saved. An automated system removes the hours spent collecting, checking, and calculating that a manual process demands, freeing that time for higher-value work.
Making Timesheets Work in Practice
The hardest part of timesheets is rarely the format. It is running the process reliably every pay period without it consuming the time of whoever handles payroll. Whether that person is an office manager, an operations lead, or an HR coordinator, the goal is the same: a process that runs with the least possible ongoing effort.
A low-effort process has three properties. Employees enter their own hours, so no one is transcribing texts and emails into a spreadsheet. The system totals hours and flags overtime, so no one is doing the arithmetic by hand. And records are retained automatically, so no one is managing a filing system to stay compliant. Every hour spent chasing and checking timesheets is an hour not spent on higher-value work.
The most common failure mode is not choosing the wrong timesheet format. It is inconsistency: some pay periods get careful attention, others get rushed because everyone was busy, and small errors accumulate into real money over time. A structured system enforces the consistency that a busy week erodes.
Setting Up Timesheets for New Hires
Timesheets are part of onboarding, even though almost no guide treats them that way. When a new hourly or non-exempt employee starts, they need to know how to record their time from day one, and you need their time tracking set up before their first paycheck. Skipping this during onboarding creates a scramble at the first payroll run.
The setup for a new hire involves a few connected steps. Classify the employee correctly as exempt or non-exempt, since that determines whether they need time tracking for pay. Add them to your timesheet system or provide the template. Explain your pay period, your submission deadline, and how to record breaks.
The last step is scope. Confirm the new hire understands what counts as work time, including any pre-shift or post-shift tasks, which the Department of Labor defines in its hours worked fact sheet. This fits naturally alongside the other paperwork a new hire completes.
The reason to handle timesheets during onboarding rather than at the first payroll run is that it prevents the most common new-hire pay problem: a first paycheck that is wrong because the hours were never captured correctly. A new employee whose first check is short or late starts their tenure with a legitimate grievance. Setting up time tracking as part of a structured onboarding process avoids that entirely.
Common Timesheet Mistakes
Most timesheet problems are not exotic. They are a small set of recurring errors that create pay disputes and compliance exposure. Recognizing them is most of the battle, because each one has a straightforward fix.
The thread connecting these mistakes is that timesheets are legal records, and treating them casually creates legal risk. Rounding against employees, averaging overtime, auto-deducting breaks, and editing hours without documentation all seem like minor administrative shortcuts, but each one is a documented source of wage claims.
The safe default is accuracy: record actual time, calculate overtime per workweek, deduct only breaks that were taken, and document every correction. A system that enforces these defaults protects you far better than good intentions do, so start by checking your current process against the six mistakes above and fixing whichever one it still allows.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a timesheet?
A timesheet is the record of how much time someone worked in a given pay period, built from daily clock-in and clock-out entries, unpaid breaks, and the totals those produce. Employers lean on it for three jobs at once: paying the right amount, invoicing clients who are billed by the hour, and holding the wage records that federal and state law expect them to produce on request. It also does a quieter fourth job, showing where the hours went across projects and tasks, which feeds cost and productivity decisions. The medium matters to none of those jobs. A ruled paper form, a spreadsheet with formulas, and an entry inside HR software all qualify, as long as the hours are accurate, approved, and retained. What separates a usable timesheet from a list of numbers is the attestation: someone confirmed the hours are real.
What is the purpose of a timesheet?
A timesheet serves four main purposes. First, it calculates accurate pay by recording exactly how many hours each employee worked, including overtime. Second, it creates the legal records that the Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep. Third, it enables client billing for businesses that charge by the hour. Fourth, it provides data on how time is spent across projects and tasks, which helps with productivity and cost analysis. The legal purpose carries the most weight when something goes wrong: if a wage dispute reaches the Department of Labor or a court and you cannot produce time records, the employee's reasonable estimate of their hours generally prevails.
What should a timesheet include?
A complete timesheet includes the employee's name and identifying information, the pay period dates, daily start and end times, meal and break periods, total hours worked per day and per week, overtime hours, and an approval signature from both the employee and the manager. The signature matters because it turns the timesheet into a defensible legal record if a wage dispute or audit ever occurs. Businesses that bill clients or cost projects add project or client codes, task categories, and a billable flag, which separates hours you can invoice to a client from internal time such as administration, business development, and training.
What are the different types of timesheets?
Timesheets are categorized three ways. By pay period: daily, weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, and monthly, matching how often you run payroll. By purpose: project timesheets track hours per job, billable timesheets separate client-billable hours, attendance timesheets track presence, overtime timesheets flag extra hours, and PTO timesheets track leave. By format: paper, spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets), or digital software. A single timesheet often combines these, such as a weekly billable project timesheet in a spreadsheet. Whatever the period, overtime for non-exempt employees is still counted one workweek at a time, which is why longer periods make it harder to track. The format decides how much manual work a timesheet creates, not what it can capture.
What is the most common type of timesheet?
The weekly and biweekly timesheets are the most common because they match the two most common US pay periods. Biweekly is the single most common pay period in the country, used by an estimated 43.0% of private establishments against 27.0% for weekly in the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of February 2023, so biweekly timesheets are widespread. Weekly sheets lead only in construction, where the same survey found 65.4% of establishments paying weekly. Leisure and hospitality leans the other way, with 54.9% of establishments on a biweekly cycle against 25.6% weekly. By purpose, a simple payroll timesheet that records daily hours and totals is the most common format, with billing and project fields added only by businesses that need them.
What is the difference between a timesheet and a timecard?
A timecard traditionally refers to a physical card stamped by a time clock that records clock-in and clock-out times. A timesheet is a broader document, paper or digital, that records hours worked and often includes breaks, project codes, and totals. In modern usage the terms overlap, but timecard usually implies a punch-clock record of raw in and out times, while timesheet implies a more complete summary used for payroll and billing. Time tracking is the wider machinery around both: how the start of a shift is registered, how totals are calculated and approved, how the hours reach payroll, and how long the file is kept.
How do you fill out a timesheet?
To fill out a timesheet, enter your name and the pay period dates, then record your start time, end time, and any unpaid break for each day worked. Calculate the total hours for each day by subtracting break time from the span between start and end. Add up the daily totals for a weekly figure, flag any hours over 40 in a workweek as overtime, and submit the timesheet for manager approval by your company's deadline. If you spot a mistake after submitting, fix it with a documented change rather than an overwrite: note the original entry, the corrected one, who changed it and why, and have both the employee and the manager sign off on the new version.
Are timesheets legally required?
Timesheets themselves are not legally required by name, but the records they contain are. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep accurate records of hours worked for all non-exempt employees, including daily and weekly hours. A timesheet is the standard way to capture that information. The duty covers part-time and remote non-exempt staff exactly as it covers full-time staff in the office: the FLSA does not address part-time employment and leaves that label to the employer, and working from home changes nothing about the wage rules. Employers who fail to keep these records face penalties in wage disputes, and the absence of records is generally held against the employer, not the employee.
How long do you have to keep timesheets?
Federal law sets two different minimums: three years for payroll records, and two years for the material used to compute pay, which is where time cards and schedules sit. Because a timesheet often does double duty as evidence for both, matching the longer clock is simpler than sorting records into two piles. Several states set longer periods on top of that federal floor, so check your own before deciding anything can be discarded. Most employers who have gone digital stop deciding altogether and keep everything, since storage costs almost nothing and a missing record in a wage dispute is expensive.
Do salaried employees need to fill out timesheets?
It depends on their classification. Exempt salaried employees, who are not entitled to overtime, generally do not need to track hours for pay purposes, though some employers track their time for project or leave management. Non-exempt salaried employees do need timesheets because they are still owed overtime for hours worked past 40 in a workweek. Exempt status also requires a salary of at least $684 a week on top of the job duties tests, so a salaried employee paid below that level is non-exempt and needs a timesheet. Misclassifying a non-exempt employee as exempt and skipping their timesheet is a common and costly wage compliance error.
Can you use a free timesheet template?
Yes. A spreadsheet or printable timesheet template works for teams with a handful of employees and simple schedules, as long as it carries the core fields: employee name, pay period dates, daily start, end, and break times, daily and weekly totals, an overtime flag, and signature lines for the employee and the manager. The limitations appear as you grow: manual templates require someone to collect, check, and total every timesheet, they create no automatic record retention, and they make overtime and compliance errors easy to miss. Most organizations move to digital time tracking inside their HR system once manual collection starts consuming real time each pay period, and more than about an hour per period is a sensible point to make that switch.
How do you calculate hours on a timesheet?
To calculate hours, find the elapsed time between start and end, subtract unpaid breaks, and convert the result to decimal hours for payroll. Divide minutes by 60 to get decimals: 15 minutes is 0.25, 30 minutes is 0.50, 45 minutes is 0.75. An employee who worked 8 hours and 15 minutes has 8.25 decimal hours. The most common error is treating minutes as decimals, writing 8.15 for 8 hours and 15 minutes instead of the correct 8.25, which underpays. Rounding punches to the nearest quarter hour is allowed only when it is neutral over time: under the 7-minute rule, 9:07 is recorded as 9:00 and 9:08 as 9:15.
Can employers round timesheet hours?
Yes, as long as the method is neutral over time. Federal rules let you record punches to a set increment such as the nearest quarter hour, provided the practice does not, across weeks and months, favor the company over the people doing the work. Under the familiar 7-minute rule, a punch at 9:07 is recorded as 9:00 and a punch at 9:08 as 9:15, so the small differences run in both directions. A policy that only ever rounds in the employer's favor is a wage violation. Since digital systems already capture the exact minute, many employers skip rounding altogether and pay for every minute worked, which is simpler to defend.
What is buddy punching?
Buddy punching is when one employee clocks a colleague in or out, so somebody gets paid for time they did not work. It persists because the older ways of capturing a punch, a shared wall clock or a shared login, cannot tell who is standing there. The fixes all work the same way: tie the punch to a person rather than to a device everyone touches. Fingerprint or face verification does that, a photo taken at the moment of the punch does it, and so does a phone app where each employee clocks in from their own handset. Clear policy language helps too, since most buddy punching starts as a favor rather than as fraud.
What is the difference between a timesheet and time tracking?
One is a record and the other is the machinery that produces it. The timesheet is the artifact: one employee, one period, hours approved and stored. Time tracking is everything around it, from how somebody registers the start of a shift to how the finished hours reach payroll and how long the file survives afterward. Without that machinery, a timesheet is a form a human has to hand out, chase, add up, and file. Inside it, the same document largely assembles itself. Every employer needs the record, so the open question is never whether to use timesheets, only how much of the surrounding labor to keep doing by hand.
Do remote employees need to fill out timesheets?
Yes. A non-exempt employee working from home falls under exactly the same wage rules as one sitting in your office, so the hours have to be recorded and the overtime has to be paid. Distance makes the record more important rather than less, because nobody sees them arrive or leave and the timesheet becomes the only evidence of what was worked. The practical answer is low friction rather than heavy oversight: give people a fast way to log hours from wherever they are, and spell out which activities count as work and when extra hours need sign-off. Monitoring software tends to cost you trust without buying accuracy.
What should a timesheet policy include?
A complete policy answers eight questions: who submits, how time is recorded, when it is due, who approves it, whether overtime needs authorization, how breaks are handled, what happens when someone reports hours falsely, and how long the records are kept. The element most often left out is the one about falsification. A timesheet is a wage record, so an inaccurate entry is not a filing mistake, and saying that plainly in writing gives you grounds to act when it happens. Written rules also keep the process identical across managers and pay periods, which is what makes the record credible if it is ever questioned.
How do you correct a mistake on a timesheet?
You correct it with a documented change, never a silent overwrite. Write down what the timesheet originally said, what it should say, who made the change, and the reason, then get the employee and the manager to sign off on the new version. A change with no trail behind it looks like tampering and costs the record its credibility in a dispute. Watch for repeats as well: when the same kind of fix keeps coming up for one person or one shift, the cause usually sits in the process, such as unclear instructions or a confusing form, and fixing that is worth more than fixing each entry.
What is the difference between billable and non-billable hours?
Billable hours are the ones you can put on a client invoice, which usually means the project work itself. Non-billable hours keep the business running without being charged to anyone: administration, business development, training, and internal meetings that sit outside any client project. Dividing billable hours by total hours gives utilization, the main profitability measure for a business that sells time, so a consultant who bills 30 hours of a 40-hour week runs at 75%. Recording the split on every timesheet is what keeps invoices accurate and shows you which work actually brings in revenue. The same entries support job costing, since a project that took 200 hours against a 120-hour quote lost money.
Do part-time employees need timesheets?
Yes. Part-time employees who are non-exempt need their hours tracked just like full-time non-exempt staff, because pay is based on actual hours worked and the same wage and hour rules apply. Accurate timesheets for part-time workers matter especially because their hours often vary week to week, making estimation unreliable. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not address part-time employment and leaves that classification to the employer, so the number of hours that separates part-time from full-time is generally your call, but the recordkeeping obligation is the same regardless of the label. That includes retention: payroll records for at least three years and the time cards behind them for at least two.
Make HR the easy part of running your business
Onboarding, e-signatures, training and core HR in one place. Up and running in 5 minutes.
- 7-day free trial
- No credit card required
- Cancel anytime