Timesheet
A timesheet is the record of how a person's working time was spent over a period, divided across the work it went to. A week showing 14 hours on one project and 22 on another is a timesheet. Its unit is the allocation of time, not the presence of a person.
A timesheet answers a different question from an attendance record. Attendance asks whether somebody was there. A timesheet asks where their attention went.
That makes it the only artefact linking people to delivery. Without one, a project's cost in effort is a guess held by whoever remembers the month best.
Its weakness is that a person fills it in. Every figure is somebody's account of their own week, written after the fact. Accuracy depends on how soon after.
So treat a timesheet as evidence with a known error bar rather than a meter reading. Filled daily, it is close. Filled fortnightly, it is a reconstruction shaped by whatever felt memorable. Both look identical once they reach a report, which is why the filling habit matters more than the form.
One test tells you which kind you have. Look at how many entries land on round numbers. A week of fours and eights was written from memory on Friday. A week with odd figures in it was written as the days happened.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster calls the timesheet a daily recap, logged per project by the person who did the work, and shown to admins as a person-by-weekday grid of hours.
Questions people ask
How often should a timesheet be filled in?
Daily, if the numbers are meant to be trusted. Memory of how a Tuesday split across three jobs fades within about a day, and it fades in a direction that flatters the biggest job.
Is a timesheet the same as an attendance record?
No. Attendance records presence, usually from a punch. A timesheet records the split of the working time across projects. The two totals rarely agree, and the gap is informative.
What makes a timesheet auditable?
A record of who changed what and when. Hours edited silently after approval leave no way to tell a correction from a rewrite.