Timesheet templates give you clarity on your team’s work and their time entries.
Managing these time entries comes in handy when you don’t want to miss those hectic project deadline days and when you want clarity on who’s present, who’s not, and most importantly, when you want to process payrolls for the employees who worked overtime.
And if you want to do all of this on paper, I call it a mayday, because there are too many ways for paper to get destroyed and lost. So, using a digital timesheet template is your best bet. If you still want it on paper, you can just print it late
In this blog, I am going to give you 5 best timesheet templates completely for free, which you can use anytime based on your needs. Let’s just get started.
What Are the 5 Types of Timesheet Templates?
There are 5 types of timesheet templates. Let me guide you through each one and how they help you.
1. Daily Timesheet Template
This is a daily timesheet, it helps you log every task that happens in a day and gives you clarity on how much time your employees are taking to complete each task. It’s also perfect for tracking short tasks, quick deliverables, and employees who work on multiple assignments in a single day. By maintaining a daily record, you can easily identify productivity patterns, manage workloads better, and address time-related inefficiencies early on.
Key Features:
- Task-Level Time Tracking: Aids you in logging every individual task along with start and end times, helping you understand how much time each activity is consuming in a day.
- Real-Time Attendance Records: Keeps an accurate record of when employees clock in and clock out, reducing manual effort and ensuring transparency in attendance tracking.
- Daily Summary Overview: Provides a clear view of total hours worked and total break time taken, allowing you to analyse productivity analyse productivity on the spot.
- Overtime and Hourly Calculation: Automatically calculates overtime hours, ensuring that extra efforts are recognised and compensated appropriately.
Best For:
Freelancers, small teams, or departments with changing priorities who need to monitor daily activities closely and ensure every working hour counts.
2. Weekly Timesheet Template
A weekly timesheet template gives you a wider picture of employee performance and workload across the entire week. If you are someone who plans projects weekly and wants to balance task distribution and resources efficiently, this is an ideal template for you.
Instead of logging every little task, this template helps you concentrate on the total productive hours per week.
Key Features:
- Weekly Work Hour Summary: Displays the total number of worked hours in the entire week, which in turn simplifies the process of monitoring consistency and identifying unusual work trends.
- Project or Department Segmentation: Divides work hours based on particular projects or departments, ultimately helping you in analysing all the time investment on a larger scale.
- Weekly Productivity Graphs (Optional): Helps you add visual elements like charts or progress bars to represent the performance and progress in that entire week.
- Auto-Generated Totals: Calculates work hours per day automatically to provide a clear weekly work schedule without any manual calculation errors.
Best For:
Ideal for managers, team leads, and HR professionals who prefer weekly updates on employee hours and productivity trends rather than daily tracking.
3. Biweekly Timesheet Template
The biweekly timesheet template is an ideal choice if your company processes payroll every two weeks. It combines the benefits of daily and weekly tracking so that you can use it to record two weeks of work information in one place. This helps you simplify payment cycles and maintain proper attendance records.
Key Features:
- 14-Day Work Record: Monitors the work hours of each employee within two weeks in a row with the complete data to calculate payroll.
- Easy Payroll Integration: Fits perfectly well with biweekly pay schedules that finance teams can use to process salaries without missing any data.
- Leave and Holiday Tracking: Includes fields where you can record the number of leaves, holidays or sick days in the pay period, which makes salary processing transparent.
- Streamlined Approval Section: Provides a field for supervisor's approval, where your managers, team leads, or project supervisors can sign or just leave a digital signature, which helps a lot in maintaining the accountability of hours reported.
Best For:
Organisations that follow biweekly pay cycles or contract-based teams requiring consistent tracking over 14-day periods for billing or payroll accuracy.
4. Monthly Timesheet Template
A monthly timesheet template helps you in recording the total working hours, attendance, and project participation for a month. It gives you a macro-level perspective, which you can use in performance reviews, reviews, payroll processing and long-term productivity analysis.
Key Features:
- Comprehensive Monthly Overview: Covers all 30 or 31 days of the month, giving you a detailed picture of attendance, work patterns, and total hours logged.
- Automated Totals and Averages: Summarises total monthly hours worked and calculates averages for productivity evaluation.
- Integrated Leave and Overtime Tracking: Maintains records of paid leaves, absences, and overtime during the entire month for accurate billing
- Performance Insights Section: Gives you space to add monthly comments or supervisor remarks, which helps in identifying strengths and improvement areas.
Best For:
HR teams, finance departments, and business owners who prefer monthly payroll processing and long-term productivity insights.
5. Project-Based Timesheet Template
A project-based timesheet template focuses solely on tracking time by projects rather than fixed dates. It’s a flexible option if your teams work on multiple projects simultaneously or if your work depends on deliverables rather than daily attendance.
Key Features:
- Project-Specific Tracking: Records the amount of time spent by each employee on individual projects, assisting in measuring effort and efficiency on every project.
- Task and Milestone Segmentation: Breaks down projects into smaller tasks and milestones and offers a better view of progress and deadlines.
- Billable vs Non-Billable Hours: Differentiates between client-billable and internal hours that simplify the process of creating accurate invoices.
- Performance and Cost Reporting: Combines time logs and cost tracking, which enables your project managers to evaluate the ROI and time efficiency of every project.
Best For:
Agencies, consultants, freelancers, and project managers who need detailed insights into time spent per project and require accurate data for billing or project analysis.
What are the Pros and Cons of Timesheet Templates?
Timesheet templates really work for most people, but you also need to be aware of the cons that come with them.
Tally both the pros and cons, before completely stepping into timesheets and see if they really align with your company’s needs
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 1. Easy to set up and requires no technical expertise | 1. Prone to manual entry errors and miscalculations |
| 2. Cost-effective option for small teams or startups | 2. Becomes difficult to manage for large teams |
| 3. Offers flexibility to customise according to project needs | 3. Lacks automation and real-time tracking features |
| 4. Simplifies payroll and client billing with clear hour logs | 4. Doesn’t integrate well with other tools or systems |
| 5. Helps monitor attendance and work distribution effectivel | 5. Provides limited insights and no advanced analytics |
How Time Champ Simplifies Timesheet Management
Timesheets are for sure efficient, but doing them manually takes time and effort. But what if I tell you can just automate this whole process? Yep, Time Champ automates timesheets for you, it tracks employee login, logout, break time, overtime, and more.
Now your employees no longer need to fill out lengthy spreadsheets, yet you can get a clear view of each team member’s work hours at a glance. This automation not only saves time but also minimises errors and creates a transparent record of daily productivity.
Beyond tracking hours, Time Champ brings smart timesheet creation, productivity insights, and integrated task management into one place. It automatically compiles activity data, categorises productive and idle time, and links tasks directly to projects, helping you understand how work hours are distributed. Features like shift scheduling and workload management align schedules with actual working hours, making attendance, overtime, and utilisation tracking more reliable. Managers can easily compare planned versus actual time spent to make better scheduling and resource decisions.
In short, Time Champ turns timesheet management into a smooth, smart, and reliable process that drives better productivity and accountability.
Conclusion
In the end, all you need is clarity, which comes with better organisation, and timesheets give you that clarity. Actually, you can use more than one timesheet, or even combine two templates to create your own template, depending on your needs and operations.
Start using a timesheet template that fits your workflow, and you’ll see how a simple change can bring more clarity, balance, and efficiency to your workday.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, they’re safe as long as they’re downloaded from trusted sources. However, for extra data protection, it’s best to store completed templates in secure folders or cloud storage with limited access permissions.
That totally depends on your workflow. Daily updates work best for detailed tracking, while weekly or biweekly updates are more convenient for teams focusing on long-term projects. Regular updates ensure no data gaps or forgotten entries.
Yes, timesheets support performance reviews, in fact, timesheets serve as factual records of attendance, workload, and consistency during appraisals. They give you a clear understanding of each employee’s contribution, punctuality, and time management.
Avoid rounding off hours too much, skipping breaks, or entering time after several days. Make sure your employees fill out timesheets often to maintain accuracy and ensure that every recorded hour truly reflects work done.
