Timesheet and time off approval workflows

Beebole’s approval workflow lets you review and lock your team’s timesheets — work time and time off alike — before they feed reports, billing, and payroll. Approvers check each submitted period and either Approve it or Reject it with a comment, stage by stage, following the workflow you configure.

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How approval works

1. A person completes their timesheet and clicks Submit at the top of the page. The button appears only when an approval workflow applies to them. The timesheet locks and enters the first approval stage.
2. The stage’s approvers are notified. Depending on the stage’s quorum, either any one of them or all of them must approve.
3. Once the stage is complete, the timesheet advances to the next stage, whose approvers are notified right away. When the last stage approves, the timesheet is Approved and its owner is notified.
4. If any approver rejects — a comment is always required — the timesheet becomes Rejected and returns to its owner, who is notified with the reason and can correct it, then click Resubmit.

The timesheet’s status badge shows where a period stands: Click the status badge, on the timesheet or next to a person in the Team pane, to open the stage breakdown: each stage shows its approver type, who has already approved and when, and who is still pending on the current stage. A stage with no eligible approver — for example, People managers when the person has no manager — shows No manager found and is skipped. If every stage finds no approver, the timesheet is approved as soon as it is submitted.

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Configuring the approval workflow

The workflow is a list of sequential stages. It lives in the Approval workflow panel, which exists at three levels: your organization’s Account Settings, every tag, and every person’s profile. Like other cascading settings, the most specific level wins — a workflow set on a person overrides one set on their tags, which overrides the account default. An icon next to the panel shows where the current workflow is inherited from. A workflow set on a tag applies to everyone under that tag, so each team can follow its own sign-off process. Every change in the panel is saved automatically — there is no save button.

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Approver types

Every stage is one more approval to collect, and an Admins stage is no exception. Administrators can approve or reject at any stage without being one of its approvers (see Force approve and reject), but each stage still needs its own approval. A People managers stage kept next to the default Admins stage therefore asks for two approvals, one per stage, even when the same administrator gives both. For a single approval from either the person’s manager or an administrator, keep one People managers stage with the quorum Any, and remove the Admins stage with Remove stage. An approval from the manager, from a manager one level above, or from an administrator then completes the timesheet. Check that everyone who submits has a manager other than themselves: a stage with no approver is skipped, so a person with no manager is approved as soon as they submit, and that period can’t be rejected afterwards.

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Reviewing and approving your team’s timesheets

Approvers can act from four places: the Timesheet page, the Journal, directly from email, or from a phone.

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From the Timesheet page

Managers and administrators see an approval button (Approval) in the button cluster at the top-left corner of the timesheet, in either view, with a red badge counting submissions waiting for them. It opens the Pending pane:

• The pane lists each timesheet waiting for your approval, with Late submissions grouped at the top. It also lists timesheets waiting at a People managers stage on a manager who reports to you, because you can approve or reject them in that manager’s place. Turn on Show all to include every pending submission you are allowed to see, not just those waiting for you.
• Click a person to open their timesheet for the submitted period. Approve and Reject buttons appear at the top of the timesheet whenever you are a pending approver, an administrator, or, on a People managers stage, a manager one level above the person’s managers.
• Select several submissions with the checkboxes to act in bulk with Approve and Reject.

The neighboring team button (Team) opens the Team pane, which lists your team members with their status for the period. People who have an approval workflow and haven’t submitted yet (their period is a draft or rejected) have a Remind button (Send reminder) that reminds them on the spot. Select people with the checkboxes — or Select all — and a bulk bar appears with Approve, Remind, and Reject, each followed by the number of people it applies to. A button that applies to nobody in the selection is left out. Every button acts only on the people it can act on, so a mixed selection is safe:

• Approve and Reject act on the selected timesheets submitted for the period on screen and waiting for you — as an administrator, on any submitted one.
• Remind goes to the selected people who have an approval workflow and whose period is a draft (empty or not) or rejected. People without a workflow have nothing to submit, so they are skipped, and people whose timesheet is approved, or submitted and waiting for someone else, are never reminded. Once the reminders are sent, those people are deselected and the submitted ones stay selected for approval.

The bar acts strictly on the period displayed: a person’s submission from another period is never approved or rejected from here.

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From the Journal

Click Journal in the left sidebar. Approvers see a banner at the top of the feed — 1 timesheet to approve, or the total count — or All caught up when nothing is waiting. Expand the banner to review without leaving the page:

• Each pending submission shows its total Hours and Billing amount — plus Cost, if your role can see costs.
• Click a person’s name to split their total by project, task, and absence type, or click View records for the day-by-day entries with their comments.
• Approve or reject one row, or select several and act in bulk.

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From your email

Approval notification emails include a summary of the submitted timesheet and Approve and Reject links that work straight from your inbox, without signing in. Approve applies the approval and opens the timesheet it acted on; Reject opens the same timesheet with the rejection dialog ready, since a reason is always required. Timesheet reminder emails likewise include a Submit now link when the period already holds entries, so your team can submit a completed period directly from the reminder. You can also decide by replying to the email — the approval email and the approval reminder both end with a note about it:

• Reply with approve alone on the first line to approve.
• Reply with reject followed by your reason — on the same line or the lines below — to reject. A reject with no reason changes nothing.

Beebole reads the first word of your reply and also understands accept, ok, yes, refuse, and decline, in any of its languages. Before applying the decision, Beebole checks that the reply comes from the approver’s own email address and that the sending mail server authenticated it. Whatever the outcome, a receipt lands in the same email thread: Approved, Rejected, or Nothing changed — the latter when the reason was missing, the sender couldn’t be verified, or the timesheet is no longer pending your approval. A reply that doesn’t start with a decision word is treated as a Journal message instead.

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From a phone

On a phone, the approval panes become a bottom sheet. Managers and administrators see a team icon in the header with a badge counting pending approvals; tapping it opens the same Pending and Team tabs, and Approve and Reject sit in the header of the timesheet you open, with bulk actions for several at once. The team icon only appears for people who can approve or review timesheets — if all you see are your own tracking controls, your role has no one to review. See Approving team timesheets on mobile.

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Rejecting a timesheet

Rejecting always requires an explanation. When you click Reject, a dialog opens with a comment box (Enter a reason for rejection…) — the Reject button stays disabled until you write one. The reason is delivered to the person, by email or push notification following their Approval updates setting, and recorded in their Journal. A rejected timesheet unlocks for its owner. After correcting the entries, they click Resubmit and the workflow starts again from the first stage. Beebole records which entries were added, modified, or deleted since the previous submission, and uses that to spare approvers unnecessary work: a project or task manager who had already approved is only asked again if entries on their own projects or tasks changed.

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Time off approval

Time off goes through the same workflow as work time. When someone records an absence on their timesheet and submits the period, the configured approval stages review it along with the rest of the timesheet. The absence counts against the person’s allowance as soon as it is recorded — approval reviews and locks the entry but does not gate the balance. See Time off for absence types and allowances.

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Editing a submitted or approved timesheet

Submitting locks a timesheet for its owner, but it doesn’t have to be rejected to be corrected: Managers are the people who see the person in their Team pane and whose role lets them change that person’s time entries. A rejected timesheet has left the workflow, so it has no current stage: the owner and their managers correct it before it is resubmitted. The Lock date in Timesheet and Planning Settings overrides this table: entries on or before it can’t be changed by anyone, administrators included. To edit on someone’s behalf, open the Pending or Team pane and click the edit button (Edit timesheet) on the person’s row. Their timesheet unlocks for you; the override switches off when you move to another person. Administrator and manager edits never restart the workflow. Only a current-stage approver’s edit on a submitted timesheet sends it back to the first stage. While you are editing, the timesheet makes it impossible to forget whose entries you are touching: the grid or calendar and every row picker are washed in the same highlight tint, the edit button on the person’s row fills with that color (Stop editing this timesheet), and an Editing badge appears next to the person’s name at the top of the page. Click the badge or the edit button again to stop editing. The override is tied to that one person — opening another person’s timesheet drops the tint and the badge along with it. The edit button is not limited to administrators. Managers see it on Draft and Rejected timesheets, and approvers of the current stage see it on the Submitted timesheets waiting for them. Beebole decides row by row, following the table above: a timesheet that is already Approved stays locked for everyone but an administrator, a Submitted one opens only for an approver of the current stage, and the restriction below can take the button away entirely.

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Force approve and reject Admin only

Administrators can unblock the pipeline without reconfiguring it: they can Approve or Reject any submitted timesheet, even when they are not approvers for the current stage. When an administrator approves a stage they are not an approver of, their approval completes that stage whatever its quorum, but it doesn’t skip the stages after it: each later stage still needs its own approvers (or another administrator approval). An already-approved timesheet can also be rejected — by an administrator, or by someone who was an approver on its last stage — which sends it back to its owner. To reach an approved timesheet, open it from the Team pane, not the Pending pane: Pending only lists submissions still waiting for a decision, so an approved period is never there. Pick the person in Team, navigate to the approved period, and Reject appears at the top of their timesheet. Rejecting unlocks the period for its owner, who corrects the entries and clicks Resubmit. To fix an entry without sending the whole period back, use the edit button (Edit timesheet) described above instead. A period that Beebole approved automatically has no Reject, for anyone, administrators included, because no submission exists to send back. This covers a period closed by Auto-submit timesheets after X days for a person with no approval workflow, a period submitted while no stage of the workflow had an approver, and a period submitted before October 8, 2026, when the Submit button still showed without a workflow. Adding a workflow afterwards doesn’t make these periods rejectable. They show Auto-approved in the person’s Journal. To correct one, an administrator uses the edit button (Edit timesheet) instead, for entries after the Lock date.

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Reminders and notifications

• Remind approvers after a number of days if not yet approved, in the Reminders tab of the Timesheet and Planning Settings panel, automatically follows up on submissions still waiting for review. While a timesheet stays pending, Beebole sends each pending approver up to four reminders, at growing intervals, then alerts the administrators five days after the last one. Set it account-wide in Account Settings, or override it on a tag or a person, just like the approval workflow itself.
• The Remind button in the Team pane sends a one-off reminder to people who have an approval workflow and haven’t submitted.
• Each person controls how they receive Approval updates in their notification settings: by email, as push notifications, or both, and instantly or as a digest. Approval updates cover both the timesheets submitted for their approval and the decisions on their own timesheets. See Notifications.

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Approval history

Every approval action is logged in the person’s Journal feed: Submitted for approval, Approved by and Rejected by entries with the approver’s name and the rejection reason, plus Auto-submitted and Auto-approved events, each tagged with its stage. For who approved what on the current submission, click the timesheet’s status badge to open the stage breakdown.

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Frequently asked questions