Certified Timesheet Tracking
Term 47 of 68 in the ERPStack technical glossary
What is Certified Timesheet Tracking?
Certified Timesheet Tracking is a time tracking system that complies with labor laws and government contracting audits, ensuring hours worked are logged accurately and signed electronically.
Certified Timesheet Tracking at a glance
- Record
- 1 immutable entry per approved period; corrections stored as adjustments, never edits
- Approval chain
- 2 signatures minimum — the person recording the time and the person accountable for it
- Storage
- Append-only journal in PostgreSQL 18 with timestamps in UTC and ISO 8601 formatting
- Why it matters
- Grant, defence and clinical billing reviews test the trail, not the total
- Built with
- Append-only tables in PostgreSQL 18 via Drizzle ORM 0.45, RBAC and SSO enforced in Next.js 16 server actions, sealed to AWS WORM storage, deployed through GitHub Actions
- Numbers that matter
- 2 approvals minimum; 1 adjusting record per correction; 0 in-place edits; UTC timestamps in ISO 8601; retention set from the governing rule
- Contrast with
- Spreadsheets and generic SaaS trackers such as Monday.com or Zoho Creator
- Commonly paired with
- An Immutable Audit Trail, RBAC, SSO, WORM object storage on AWS, and payroll and billing inside the ERP
- Timestamp rule
- Entries stored in UTC and formatted to ISO 8601, so a correction raised 8 hours away in a different offset still lands in the right period.
- Retention
- Set from the governing rule rather than a default: 21 CFR Part 11 keeps the audit trail at least as long as the record, and a 3-year grant review reads the trail, not the total.
- Who needs it
- government contracting, healthcare and legaltech billing, and any manufacturing or logistics operation billing labour to a client — all reading 1 PostgreSQL 18 journal under RBAC and SSO.
How Certified Timesheet Tracking works in production
The ERPStack approach to Certified Timesheet Tracking
We develop certified timesheet modules with built-in DCAA compliance logs, tracking every work log entry and approval event in tamper-proof tables.
Frequently asked questions about Certified Timesheet Tracking
What makes Timesheet Tracking 'certified' rather than ordinary?
Certified Timesheet Tracking is designed so the record can be defended after the fact. That means an entry cannot be silently edited, every correction is a new adjusting record with an author and a reason, approvals are captured as events, and clocks are stored in UTC to survive daylight-saving shifts. Ordinary time tracking optimises for convenience; certified tracking optimises for surviving a reviewer who assumes nothing.
Why can't approved timesheets simply be edited?
Because an editable record proves nothing. Once an approval exists, Timesheet Tracking has to treat the entry as evidence: the original stands, and a correction is appended with its own approval. This is the same append-only discipline used for financial ledgers, and it is what allows a reviewer 2 years later to see both what was claimed and what was corrected, rather than only the final figure.
How does Timesheet Tracking connect to billing and payroll?
Through 1 approved dataset feeding both. When Timesheet Tracking, invoicing and payroll each hold their own copy, the 3 disagree within a month and someone reconciles by hand. Keeping approved time in the ERP transaction boundary means an invoice line and a payroll cost derive from the same rows, and a late adjustment updates both through the normal correction path.
What does ERPStack build into a time-tracking module?
Append-only entries, adjustment records rather than edits, Role-Based Access Control so a person cannot approve their own submission, and UTC timestamps throughout. Timesheet Tracking built this way produces the artefact reviewers ask for — a complete history — without anyone having to assemble it manually when a grant or contract audit lands.