A timesheet is a record of the hours each person spent on each piece of work over a period, usually a week. Agencies and consultancies use it to bill clients by the hour, and internal teams use it to see where time actually goes, how much of the week is spent on planned work, and how far estimates drift from reality. A traditional timesheet is a spreadsheet that people fill in on Friday from memory. A timesheet built on the work itself works the other way round: each task carries its estimate, hours are logged against that task as the work happens, and the weekly timesheet is simply a view of those logs grouped by person and day. That is how the Quire Timesheet template works. Nobody types the same hours twice, the totals always match the tasks, and every hour can be traced back to the piece of work, the person and the note that explains it.

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Q: What is the difference between a Time Report and a Timesheet in Quire?

Both are tabs of the Time Tracker view and both read the same time logs, but they arrange them differently. The Time Report lists every time entry in date order, one row per entry, with the task, member, duration, start and end time, note and whether the entry is billable. Its chart splits each day into billable and non-billable hours. Use it to check individual entries and to see how a task's hours add up against its estimate when you group by task. The Timesheet arranges the same week by person: one row per member, one column per day, and a total for each. Its chart stacks the hours by member, so you can see at a glance who logged what on which day. Use it for the weekly review, for workload, and for billing. The Time Report is available on the Professional, Premium and Enterprise plans, and the Timesheet on Premium and Enterprise.

Q: How do I track billable hours in Quire?

Log time on the task the hours belong to, then mark which hours go on an invoice. In Quire, open the task, start the stopwatch or add a time entry by hand, and add a note that says what the time was for. Each time entry has its own billable flag, which the Time Report uses to split billable from non-billable hours. The Timesheet template adds a Billable checkbox and an Hourly Rate field to each task, and a Billable Total formula that multiplies the task's time spent by its rate whenever Billable is checked. Rework and internal time are still logged, so utilization stays honest, but Billable stays off and they never reach the invoice. At the end of the week, open Table view, filter to the week, and sum Billable Total per client section to get the amount to invoice. Time tracking is available on the Professional, Premium and Enterprise plans.

Q: How do I calculate a billable amount from logged time in Quire?

Add a Money custom field for the hourly rate and a Formula field that multiplies the time spent by that rate. Quire stores time spent in seconds, so convert it to hours inside the formula. The Timesheet template uses the formula {Billable} ? timeSpent.minutes / 60 * {Hourly Rate} : 0 in a field called Billable Total. It reads the Billable checkbox first: when the task is billable, it takes the total minutes logged, divides by 60 to get hours including fractions, and multiplies by the rate; when it is not billable, it returns zero. Using minutes rather than whole hours keeps a 17.5 hour task at 17.5 hours instead of rounding it. The result recalculates every time someone logs or edits time, so the billable amount can never drift from the logs. In Table view, turn on Sum under the column to total a week or a client section.

Q: What does Variance mean on a timesheet?

Variance is the difference between the hours logged on a task and the hours estimated for it. In the Quire Timesheet template it is a Formula field, timeSpent - estimated, so it reads both of Quire's built-in time fields and needs no typing. A positive Variance means the task ran over its estimate, a negative one means it came in under or is still in progress, and zero means the estimate was exactly right. In the sample, Homepage build was estimated at 16 hours from the statement of work and logged 17.5, so its Variance is plus 1 hour 30 minutes, and the last time entry explains why. Variance matters twice. During the weekly review, any task more than two hours over gets a comment before it is approved for billing. Later, sorting the whole project by Variance shows which kinds of work are always underestimated, which is the input the next quote needs.

Q: Which time logging method should my team use?

Pick the method that matches how precise the numbers need to be, and use one method per client. A real-time timer, started and stopped as the work happens, gives the most accurate hours and suits billable work where every quarter hour is invoiced, but someone will always forget to stop it. A daily timesheet, filled in at the end of each day, costs about five minutes a day and gives decent data for internal teams. A weekly timesheet, filled in on Friday, is the cheapest and the least accurate, since memory rounds to the nearest half day, so keep it for stable, low-variance work. Automatic tracking reads activity rather than intent and suits solo work or sampling. Mixing methods within one client produces numbers that look comparable and are not. The Quire template records the method on each task in a Logging Method field, so the review can see how much to trust each figure.

Q: How do I approve timesheet hours in Quire?

Use task statuses as the approval chain, so a task cannot reach an invoice without passing through review. The Quire Timesheet template uses Not started, In progress, Submitted, Approved and Invoiced, plus Rejected for hours the reviewer sends back. When the work is finished and logged, the person who did it moves the task to Submitted. Once a week, the reviewer opens the Awaiting approval sublist, checks Variance on each task, asks for a comment on anything more than two hours over, and moves the hours that are right to Approved. Approved billable tasks then go onto an invoice sublist, the Billable Total column is summed for the client, the invoice is sent, and the tasks move to Invoiced. Submitted means the maker says the hours are done; Approved means someone else agrees. Keeping the two steps apart is what makes the invoice defensible.

Q: Why is the Time Tracker empty when I open the Timesheet template?

The Time Tracker always opens on the current week, and the sample time logs in the Quire Timesheet template are dated October 2027. To see them, open the Time Tracker, then use the right arrow or the calendar picker next to Export CSV to move to the week of October 17 to 23, 2027, or October 24 to 30, 2027. The first week holds the finished and invoiced sample work, and the second holds work still in progress and waiting for approval. Click Today to jump back to the current week. Once you replace the sample tasks with your own and start logging time, the current week fills in as you work and no navigation is needed. If the Time Tracker icon is missing entirely, check your plan: the Time Report needs the Professional plan or above, and the Timesheet needs Premium or Enterprise.

Q: Is there a ready-made timesheet template in Quire?

Yes. Quire provides a ready-made Timesheet project at quire.io/w/Timesheet38 that you can duplicate into your own workspace. The sample is a four-person studio over two weeks, with one section for a billable website rebuild, one for a fixed-fee mobile app, and one for internal time such as meetings, training, sales calls and hiring. It has 21 tasks with estimates and 40 time logs, six statuses that form the approval chain from Not started to Invoiced, and six custom fields: Billable, Hourly Rate, Week, Logging Method, and the Variance and Billable Total formulas. Four tags mark billable, non-billable, overtime and rework hours, an Awaiting approval sublist holds the week's submitted tasks, an invoice sublist shows what one sent invoice contained, and a How to use this template document explains each part. Rename the sections to your clients, replace the tasks, and log time as you work.

Use this template to keep a timesheet on the work itself instead of in a spreadsheet: each task carries an estimate, hours are logged against it as the work happens, and formulas work out the variance and the billable amount. The Time Tracker turns the same logs into a Time Report and a weekly Timesheet.

the quire timesheet template in table view: three sections for a billable website rebuild, a fixed-fee mobile app and internal time, with estimate, variance and billable total columns on every task

You can visit the Timesheet project and duplicate it to your workspace, so you don’t need to build everything from scratch.

You can also explore more ready-to-use templates to speed up your workflow.

Understand a Timesheet

A timesheet records who spent how many hours on what, usually per week. Agencies bill clients from it. Internal teams use it to see where the week goes and how far estimates drift.

When the timesheet lives on the tasks, nobody fills it in twice. Each task holds its estimate and its time logs, and the weekly timesheet is a view of those logs grouped by person and day.

Logging Methods

How hours get captured decides how much the numbers can be trusted.

Method	Best for	What it costs
Real-time timer	Billable work where every quarter hour is invoiced	Someone always forgets to stop it
Daily timesheet	Internal teams that need decent data, not invoices	Five minutes a day, and honest recall
Weekly timesheet	Stable, low-variance work	Friday memory rounds to the nearest half day
Automatic	Solo work and sampling	It reads activity, not intent

Pick one method per client and hold the whole team to it. The template records the method on each task, so the weekly review knows which figures are exact and which are recalled.

Lay Out the Work

Each section is one client or workstream, and each task under it is one piece of work with an estimate taken from the quote or the statement of work.

The sample is a four-person studio over two weeks, with 21 tasks and 40 time logs:

Northwind Retail · website rebuild (billable): client work billed by the hour
Harbor Logistics · mobile app (fixed fee): client work on an agreed price, logged and rated like hourly work so the hours can be checked against the fee
Internal · non-billable: team syncs, training, a sales call, hiring and the Friday review itself

the quire timesheet template in list view with the northwind retail section expanded to its eight tasks and the harbor logistics and internal sections collapsed

Keep the Internal section even if nobody bills for it. Without it, a 40-hour week looks like 30 hours of client work and 10 hours that went nowhere.

Log Hours on the Task

Time Tracking is only available in the Professional, Premium, Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Track time on the task the hours belong to: start the stopwatch while you work, or add an entry by hand at the end of the day. Write a note on each entry that says what the time was for.

Homepage build was estimated at 16 hours. Katherine logged four entries over three days, and the last note reads “Safari fixes, 1.5h over estimate”. The overrun is explained before anyone asks.

the homepage build task in the quire timesheet template, with four time entries by katherine against a 16 hour estimate and the note of one entry shown on hover

Each time entry also has its own billable flag. The Time Report uses it to split the chart into billable and non-billable hours.

Read the Time Tracker

The Time Tracker view reads every time log in the project and lays it out in two tabs: Time Report and Timesheet. Open it from the Time Tracker icon in the upper-right corner of the main panel.

Tip: The Time Tracker opens on the current week, and the sample logs are dated October 2027. Use the right arrow or the calendar picker beside Export CSV to move to Oct 17 - 23, 2027 or Oct 24 - 30, 2027, then click Today to come back.

Time Report

The Time Report is only available in the Professional, Premium, Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

The Time Report lists every time entry in date order: the task, the member, the duration, the start and end time, the note, and a mark on billable entries. The chart above it splits each day into billable and non-billable hours.

the time report tab of the quire time tracker for oct 24 to 30, 2027, with a billable and non-billable chart above a list of time entries

Use it to check individual entries: a missing note, a timer left running overnight, a billable mark on internal time. Group the report by Task to see each task’s logged total next to its estimate.

Timesheet

The Timesheet is only available in the Premium and Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

The Timesheet turns the same week around: one row per member, one column per day, and a total at the end of each row and column. The chart stacks each day’s hours by member, and hovering a bar shows who logged what.

the timesheet tab of the quire time tracker for oct 24 to 30, 2027, with hours stacked by member, one member expanded to tasks and a task expanded to its time entries

In the sample week of Oct 24, the team logged 67 hours. Katherine carried 30.5 of them, Felipe only 5.

Expand a member’s row to see the tasks behind their hours, then expand a task to see each entry by its note. Katherine’s 21.5 hours on Product listing page break down into the grid and card component, filters and pagination, and empty states and QA fixes. Click Add new entry below the table to log time for a day that was missed.

Which One to Use

Question	Tab
Is every entry right, with a note?	Time Report
Which tasks ran past their estimate?	Time Report, grouped by Task
How many hours did each person log this week?	Timesheet
Who is overloaded, and who has room?	Timesheet

Both tabs can be narrowed from the filter bar, and Export CSV downloads whichever tab is open.

Calculate Variance and Billable Total

Table view is only available in the Professional, Premium, Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Two built-in time fields and six custom fields sit on every task. Table view shows them as columns.

Field	Type	What it holds
Estimate	Built-in	The hours the quote or statement of work allowed
Time spent	Built-in	The total of every time log on the task
Variance	Formula	Time spent minus Estimate. Positive means the task ran over
Billable	Checkbox	Whether the hours are client work that Billable Total prices
Hourly Rate	Money	The rate for this task, since one person can bill differently per client
Billable Total	Formula	Time spent times Hourly Rate, or zero when Billable is off
Week	Select	Which week’s timesheet the task belongs to
Logging Method	Select	Real-time timer, Daily timesheet, Weekly timesheet or Automatic

Set Billable, Hourly Rate, Week and Logging Method when a task enters In progress. The two formulas need nothing from anyone.

Variance

timeSpent - estimated

Billable Total

{Billable} ? timeSpent.minutes / 60 * {Hourly Rate} : 0

Billable Total divides minutes by 60, so 21.5 hours on Product listing page at $120 comes to $2,580. Reading timeSpent.hours instead would round to whole hours. Rework and internal tasks keep Billable off: their hours still count toward the week, but their Billable Total stays blank.

On the fixed-fee Harbor Logistics tasks, Billable Total is not what gets invoiced. It is what the hours were worth at the rate the fee was priced at, so adding it up shows whether the fee covered the work.

Sort by Variance to find the estimates that need fixing before the next quote. The bottom row already sums Billable Total, so filter to one week or one client section and it shows that total. Learn more about column calculations.

Approve Hours Before Billing

In the Free Subscription plan, you can have up to 5 statuses in each project, and this template uses 6. Drop Rejected and send hours back to In progress instead, or upgrade your subscription plan to keep all six. More information can be found on our pricing page.

The statuses are the approval chain, so no hour reaches an invoice without passing a second pair of eyes.

Status	Meaning
Not started	Estimated, no time logged yet
In progress	Work and logging under way
Submitted	The person who did the work says it is done and fully logged
Approved	Someone else has checked Variance and agrees the hours are right
Invoiced	The approved billable hours have been billed
Rejected	The reviewer sent the hours back

Two sublists support the review:

Awaiting approval: every task in Submitted, waiting for the review
Invoice · Northwind · W42: the billable Northwind tasks approved in the week of Oct 18, as an example of one invoice and its paper trail

Four tags mark the kind of hours: Billable, Non-billable, Overtime for hours after the normal day, and Rework for fixing something already billed, which is logged against the original estimate and never invoiced twice.

The Friday Review

Open the Awaiting approval sublist.
Check Variance on each task. Anything more than two hours over gets a comment explaining why.
Move the hours that are right to Approved, and anything wrong to Rejected.
Open the Timesheet tab and read each person’s total against 40 hours.
For each hourly client, add the approved billable tasks to a new invoice sublist, sum Billable Total in Table view, and send the invoice.
Move the invoiced tasks to Invoiced.

Keep the Numbers Honest

Two habits keep a timesheet worth reading.

Log against the task, with a note. An entry that says “Safari fixes, 1.5h over estimate” answers the review question before it is asked.
Treat a wrong estimate as data. An estimate that was wrong is useful. One that was wrong and nobody noticed sinks the next quote.

When you adapt the template:

Fixed-fee client? Keep Billable on and set the rate the fee was priced at. Invoice the agreed fee, and compare it with the summed Billable Total to see whether the price was right
Freelancer? Delete the team tasks in the Internal section and keep the Friday review
Larger agency? Add one section per client, and one invoice sublist per month instead of per week
Team won’t run a timer? Pick the daily timesheet, add a recurring end-of-day task for each person, and accept data that is 90 percent right over a timer nobody starts

Read more on our blog about time tracking in project management.

Start Your Timesheet

Everything on this page can be built by hand. The template is the same thing already assembled: three sections, 21 tasks with estimates and time logs, six statuses, six custom fields including the Variance and Billable Total formulas, four tags, two sublists and the how-to document.

Duplicate the Timesheet project into your workspace, then:

Rename the three sections to your clients or workstreams.
Delete the sample tasks and add one task per piece of work, with an Estimate from the quote.
Set Billable, Hourly Rate, Week and Logging Method when each task starts.
Log hours on the task as you work, with a note on every entry.
Every Friday, review the Awaiting approval sublist, then invoice what was approved.

the four logging methods table in the how to use this template document of the quire timesheet template

Point your team at the How to use this template document. It keeps the field definitions and the review steps inside the project, for anyone who does not read this guide.

To agree on scope and budget before the hours start, begin with the Project Charter template. For the daily check on what moved, pair the timesheet with the Daily Standup Meeting template.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a timesheet?

A timesheet records the hours each person spent on each piece of work, usually per week. In the Quire template it is a view of time logged on the tasks themselves, so nobody fills it in twice.

What is the difference between a Time Report and a Timesheet in Quire?

The Time Report lists every time entry in date order and splits the chart into billable and non-billable hours. The Timesheet shows one row per member and one column per day, with weekly totals.

How do I track billable hours in Quire?

Log time on the task, then check the template’s Billable field and set an Hourly Rate. The Billable Total formula multiplies the hours by the rate, and summing it in Table view gives the invoice amount.

How do I calculate a billable amount from logged time in Quire?

Use a Formula field such as {Billable} ? timeSpent.minutes / 60 * {Hourly Rate} : 0. It converts the logged minutes to hours, multiplies by the rate, and returns zero when the task is not billable.

What does Variance mean on a timesheet?

Variance is time spent minus the estimate. Positive means the task ran over, and the template calculates it with the formula timeSpent - estimated.

Which time logging method should my team use?

Use a real-time timer for billable work, a daily timesheet for internal teams, and a weekly timesheet only for stable routines. Pick one method per client so the numbers stay comparable.

How do I approve timesheet hours in Quire?

Move finished tasks to Submitted, review Variance in the Awaiting approval sublist, then move correct hours to Approved. Approved billable tasks are invoiced and moved to Invoiced.

Why is the Time Tracker empty when I open the Timesheet template?

It opens on the current week, and the sample time logs are dated October 2027. Use the arrows or the calendar picker to move to Oct 17 - 23 or Oct 24 - 30, 2027.

Is there a ready-made timesheet template in Quire?

Yes. Visit the Timesheet project and duplicate it to your workspace to get three sections, 21 sample tasks with time logs, an approval chain of six statuses, and the Variance and Billable Total formulas.

Please contact us if you need more assistance.