Draft and submitted timesheets
Draft and submitted are the two states a timesheet holds before review. A draft is still the author's to change. Submitting hands it on and fixes the hours as a claim. These two states share one page because they are one transition, and neither means anything without the other.
The distinction exists so that half-finished work is not mistaken for a claim. Wednesday afternoon's partial entry is not the week. Something has to say when the author is done.
Without the transition, a reviewer cannot tell an incomplete sheet from a light week. Both show fewer hours than expected. Only one needs chasing.
Submission also sets the moment the hours stop moving. After it, a change is a correction with a reason behind it, not an edit.
Leaving drafts unsubmitted is the commonest failure in any approval flow, and it is nearly always a chasing problem rather than a refusal. People fill the sheet and forget the button. So count the unsubmitted ones, because a queue holding only what arrived measures the wrong population.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster moves a timesheet from draft to submitted as a recorded status change, and its audit log keeps the before and after values of the field that moved.
Questions people ask
Can a submitted timesheet be changed?
Normally only by an explicit correction, reviewed the way the original was. That is the difference the submission makes: after it, a change should leave a trace.
What happens to a timesheet nobody submits?
It sits in draft and never reaches review, so those hours are missing from every report built on submitted sheets. This is why the unsubmitted count is worth watching on its own.
Should drafts be visible to a manager?
Visible enough to chase, not so visible they get acted on. A draft is a work in progress, and reading it as a claim produces conversations about numbers the author had not finished.