Time

Hours are recorded against a pay period, because a period is the unit payroll pays and approval is what has to happen before it. Everyone whose pay moves with the clock appears, including the people who have recorded nothing — those are precisely the ones holding payroll up, and a list of submitted timesheets hides them.

Three rules are enforced in the domain rather than in the interface, which means no screen can get around them. Nobody approves their own hours: a manager paid hourly has a timesheet too, and signing it themselves removes the only check on it. A rejection needs a reason, because hours bounced back without one turn into a guessing game that ends in changing figures until they are accepted. And once payroll has taken the hours, they stop moving — a calculation whose inputs change underneath it cannot be reproduced.

Durations are stored as whole minutes and only ever shown as decimal hours. 7.4 hours is not a number a computer holds exactly, and a week of them added in floating point does not equal the sum of its days. At an hourly rate, that difference is somebody’s pay. You can type 7.5, 7:30 or 7h 30m — all three are things people write.