Timecard statuses and overtime rules
Statuses
A timecard moves through four statuses over a pay period:
Open — the default state while a technician is still clocking time; nothing has been submitted yet.
Submitted — the technician has submitted their week for review.
Approved — a manager accepted a frozen revision; it is ready for payroll unless marked Needs reapproval.
Sent back — a manager returned it with a note; the technician can edit entries and resubmit.
Only an Open or Sent-back timecard can be edited. Once submitted, entries are locked until a manager either approves it or sends it back. Approval freezes that exact payroll revision. A manager can later reopen an approved card for a correction; the earlier approval remains in its history, and the next approval creates a new revision.
If late clock activity or a payroll-policy change would make the live calculation differ from an approved revision, Essential marks it Needs reapproval without changing the approved hours. The period is not ready for payroll until the card is sent back and approved again.
How overtime is calculated
Overtime is calculated per calendar workweek — the "Week starts on" day set in Time & Pay — not per pay period. Hours worked past the weekly cap in a workweek are overtime, paid at the configured multiplier.
If your business tracks travel time, the cap runs on paid hours: paid travel counts toward the weekly cap like work, while travel that's unpaid under your travel policy stays visible on the timecard but never adds to paid hours or overtime.
This matters most on semimonthly pay periods, or a bi-weekly cycle that doesn't align to the workweek: when a workweek is split across two pay periods, Essential still caps overtime against the full workweek, and attributes it to whichever period contains the hours that pushed the week over the cap. A pay period's timecard only shows its own days, but the overtime figure on those days accounts for hours in the neighboring period too.
An entry that crosses midnight counts entirely toward the day it started (business-local time), not the day it ended — matching common payroll practice for overnight shifts.
Entry rules
A single time entry can't be longer than 24 hours, and can't start in the future. Manual entries and corrections to a clocked entry both require a short reason (for example, "forgot to clock out").
Where to find it: Status pills and overtime figures appear on the Timecards page and the mobile Timecard tab.
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