Timesheet approval
Timesheet approval is the review step in which somebody other than the author accepts a submitted set of hours. The reviewer is normally a lead or manager with sight of the work. Approval marks the hours as agreed rather than merely claimed.
A reviewer can genuinely check three things. Whether the total is plausible for the week. Whether the split matches what they saw happening. Whether anything obvious is missing.
A reviewer cannot verify that a given hour happened. Nobody can. Pretending otherwise turns the step into theatre and makes it feel insulting to the person being reviewed.
So the value of approval is a second pair of eyes catching the errors people make about their own week. A project left off. A day double-counted.
Queue size decides whether any of that happens. Forty sheets in one sitting produces a clicking exercise, not a review. Approve weekly and in small batches, and the check is real. Let it stack up to month end and approval becomes a rubber stamp everybody knows is a rubber stamp.
Rejecting well is its own skill. A sheet sent back with no reason teaches the author nothing and arrives as an accusation. Name the line that looks wrong and say what would settle it. Two sentences, and the same mistake stops recurring.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster holds submitted timesheets in an approvals queue, beside a Needs Attention view that surfaces the people and projects worth looking at first.
Questions people ask
Who should approve a timesheet?
Somebody close enough to the work to notice when the split looks wrong. A reviewer two levels away can only check arithmetic, which the system already did.
What should a reviewer reject?
Sheets that are incomplete, clearly misattributed, or missing a project the reviewer knows was worked on. Rejecting an hour on suspicion alone is not a check anyone can defend.
Does approval make the hours accurate?
No. It makes them agreed. Those are different claims, and conflating them gives a report more authority than the underlying data earns.