How to Fill Out a Timesheet Correctly

A good timesheet is accurate, complete, and still makes sense when you look at it three months later. Whether you're billing a client or just keeping track of your own week, the difference between a useful timesheet and a guess comes down to a handful of habits. Here are the ones that matter most.

Record time as you go

Memory fades fast. Try to reconstruct Monday on Friday afternoon and you'll round, you'll forget the short calls, and you'll quietly lose half an hour here and there. The closer you log time to when the work actually happened, the more accurate it is. This is the single biggest reason to build your timesheet from your calendar: it captures real start and end times while the week is still fresh, rather than asking you to remember them later.

Assign the right project

Every line on your Draft Timesheet should be tied to the correct project. In VibaCloud the project is the single source of truth for whether time is billable and at what rate, so getting the project right is what makes the value right too. There's no fiddling with rates on individual rows, which removes a whole category of mistakes. If a line is sitting under the wrong project, both its billable status and its value will be off, so this is the field worth double checking.

Get billable and non-billable time right

Billable time is work a client pays for: the design session, the build, the review call. Non-billable time covers everything else that's still part of your job, such as internal meetings, admin, learning and proposals. Both are worth recording. In VibaCloud, non-billable lines simply carry a value of zero, so they don't inflate an invoice, but they still show up in your week.

It's tempting to leave the non-billable stuff off entirely, but don't. Tracking it gives you an honest picture of where your time really goes, and that picture is what tells you whether a "small" client is quietly eating your week in unpaid admin.

Get the numbers right

A few practical points keep your hours honest:

• Resist heavy rounding. Bumping every entry to the nearest hour feels harmless, but across a month those minutes add up in someone's favour, and it usually isn't yours.
• Check your all-day events. They use a default length rather than a full day, so adjust any that don't match the hours you actually worked.
• Don't double-count overlaps. If two events clash in your calendar, decide which one you were really doing and tidy up the other.
• Add the work that wasn't a meeting. A manual line takes seconds and stops real hours going missing.

Review before you submit

Submitting a week locks it. VibaCloud freezes the hours, rates and values at that point, which is exactly what you want for a record you might invoice against, but it does mean a quick read-through first is time well spent. Scan the grid, confirm the daily and weekly totals look about right, and then submit with confidence.

Spotted something afterwards? You're not stuck with it. Reopen the week, make the correction, and submit again. Every reopen is tracked, so there's always a clear trail of what changed, and you can view or print any past week from My Timesheets whenever you need it.

If you're still setting things up, the guide on creating a timesheet from your calendar pairs well with this one.