Free timesheet template (Excel): what it has to record for Fair Work, and when it breaks

A timesheet template should record, for each day, the start time, the finish time, the unpaid break and the site or job, plus who worked the hours, who approved them and when. The one below is a free Excel file for Australian crews, covers a week or a fortnight, and totals hours even when a shift finishes after midnight.

A template is how most crews start, and for a handful of people on day shift it works. So, like its sister piece on roster templates, this article plays it straight: first the download and what Fair Work expects it to capture, then the point where the spreadsheet stops being the record and becomes the Friday chase.

Download the free timesheet template

Download the Humanz timesheet template (Excel, .xlsx). No sign-up, no email gate, no watermark. It opens in any current version of Excel and imports into Google Sheets.

What’s in it

• Weekly. Employee name, role, a drop-down employment type (Full-time, Part-time, Casual, Labour hire, Subcontractor), site or client, and a Week starting cell that dates the seven day rows. Each day has a start time, a finish time, an unpaid break in minutes, hours worked, a job or site, and notes. Hours worked is a formula that handles a finish after midnight, and the week totals at the bottom.
• Declaration and approval lines. The employee declares the hours are true; the supervisor signs off with name, signature and date. A variance from roster column beside the day rows takes the supervisor’s note of any difference between worked and rostered hours, next to the worker’s entry rather than over it.
• Fortnightly. The same layout across fourteen days with a fortnight total.
• How to use. A one-page sheet with the Fair Work record-keeping list and a plain statement of what the template does not do.

How to use it. Enter the day the week starts and the person’s details, then each day’s start and finish as times (6:30, 15:00), the unpaid break in minutes (type 0 on purpose if there was none), the job or site, and anything the supervisor should know in the notes. At week’s end the worker signs the declaration, the supervisor checks the hours against the roster, writes any variance and signs, and the sheet goes to whoever runs the pay.

What it does not do

It records hours. It does not calculate pay, overtime rates, penalty rates, allowances or award entitlements, and it holds no leave balances. A spreadsheet that guesses at an award is more dangerous than one that stays quiet; the total is there for your payroll to apply the right rate to.

What an Australian timesheet has to record

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s record-keeping page sets out what time and wages records have to be: kept for seven years, legible, in English, readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector, not changed unless the change corrects an error, and not false or misleading. The Ombudsman publishes a basic timesheet template there too; ours adds the field-crew columns.

On hours, the required records are narrower than most people assume. An employer must record:

• the number of overtime hours worked in a day, and when they started and finished, where penalty rates or loadings are paid for them;
• the hours worked by a casual or irregular part-time employee paid on time worked;
• a copy of any written agreement to average an employee’s hours.

Pay slips carry a separate clock: within one working day of pay day, and for an hourly-paid employee the slip must show the ordinary rate, the hours worked at it and the amount paid. The full list, the retention rules and the sting in the tail (without records, you may have to prove to a court that you did not underpay) are in employee records you must keep in Australia. The Ombudsman’s best-practice line is simpler: keep records of hours worked for all employees.

Read that list against a site crew and it covers nearly everyone: the casual on a loading, the operator who stayed back for the pour, the labourer whose Saturday attracts a penalty rate. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ working arrangements release for August 2025 counted 17% of employees, 2.1 million people, with no guaranteed minimum hours each week, and those are the workers whose daily hours the law expects to find written down.

Why start, finish and break beat a single hours figure

A column that just says “9.5” fails three tests at once. It cannot show when overtime started, which the record requires. It cannot be checked against a roster, because a roster is a start and a finish. And it cannot settle an argument, because the only thing anyone can dispute about “9.5” is the whole number.

Start, finish and unpaid break fix all three. The Ombudsman’s page on breaks is clear that awards and agreements set which breaks are paid and which are unpaid, and the paid crib break common on construction and mining sites is why the template asks for unpaid minutes rather than “lunch”: a crew on a paid crib enters 0, a crew on an unpaid half hour enters 30, and the reason the total is right is on the sheet. The same three numbers let you check a long day against maximum hours worked in a row, and the gap between shifts against the rest many awards require.

How to use the weekly and fortnightly sheets

The weekly sheet suits a weekly pay run or a supervisor who signs off every Friday; the fortnightly sheet suits a fortnightly run and saves the stapling. Four field situations come up often.

Night shifts that finish after midnight. Enter the shift on the day it starts: 18:00 to 06:00 on the Tuesday row. The formula sees a finish earlier than the start, adds 24 hours and returns 12 less the unpaid break. Do not split it across two rows, or the daily record is wrong even while the weekly total is right.

A day split across two sites. One row per day means one site cell per day. Put the main site in it and the split in the notes (“Site A to 11:30, Site B from 12:00”), with travel between them treated as your award or agreement says. If you need hours by site for costing every week, you have found the first thing the template cannot do.

Subbies and labour hire on the same sheet. The employment type drop-down includes Labour hire and Subcontractor, so one layout serves the whole crew on a shutdown. The record-keeping obligation attaches to your employees; a subcontractor’s signed sheet is the evidence behind their invoice, and a labour hire worker’s hours go back to the provider who pays them. One format means one document for the supervisor to sign.

The supervisor’s variance column. The column most templates lack. A worker writes 11 hours; the roster said 10; the supervisor agrees the extra hour was real, or does not. Either way the outcome goes in the variance column (“+1.0, callout approved” or “-1.0, left 15:00”) and the worker’s original entry stays legible. That is the difference, in the Ombudsman’s words, between a record changed to correct an error and one that was simply changed.

Five timesheet mistakes the template is built to catch

Hours from memory on Friday. Seven dated rows and a declaration in the worker’s own hand. A sheet filled from memory shows the same start and finish every day, and a supervisor who knows the week will notice. The real fix is filling the row at knock-off; the sheet just makes it easy.

No break recorded. A blank break cell is treated as zero, which means the template pays the break. Right for a paid crib, wrong for an unpaid lunch, which is why the How to use sheet asks for a deliberate 0, and why an approver should read a blank as a question.

A finish before a start. The formula treats a finish earlier than the start as overnight, so a day-shift row with 07:00 and 06:30 (a slip for 16:30) returns 23.5 hours. Impossible to miss, rather than a quiet negative that gets rounded away.

An unsigned sheet. Two signature lines, because two people have to stand behind the number: the one who worked it and the one who approved it. One signature is a claim; two is a record. Payroll should send back anything missing either.

An edited number with no trail. The one a spreadsheet cannot fully solve, so the template routes around it: supervisors correct in the variance column, never in the worker’s cells. If a worker’s cell has been overtyped there is no way to know, which is the honest limit of a file anyone can open.

When a spreadsheet timesheet breaks

All of this works for a crew of six on one site. The breaking point comes earlier than it does for rosters, because a roster is made once a fortnight and a timesheet by every worker every day. Four things give way.

The Friday chase. The template does not know who has not filled it in. Someone has to, and that someone spends Friday afternoon ringing down a list. The timesheet approval workflow post covers the outstanding list that builds itself.

Approvals by email. The signed sheet is photographed and sent, or attached and replied to, and the record now lives in a dozen inboxes. Nobody can say how many are approved, or which version was.

Re-keying into payroll. Approved hours get typed into the pay run, every keystroke a chance to turn 7.5 into 7, and the transcription becomes the only record anyone reads. Since payday super, the days re-keying costs are days off a legislated deadline. If pay runs through Xero, connecting rostering and timesheets to Xero is this handoff without the typing.

The audit question. “Who changed this and when?” is what a Fair Work Inspector, an auditor or an unhappy ex-employee will ask, and a shared spreadsheet answers with a shrug. The wider list of what goes wrong is in how to reduce timesheet errors.

For a figure before changing anything, the timesheet cost calculator prices the current pipeline, chase and re-keying included, in four inputs. The wider category is time and attendance software in Australia.

How Humanz replaces the template

The template idea is right: a worker should confirm a shift, not describe one from scratch. Humanz moves the template from a file into the system, so the sheet above becomes a screen on the worker’s phone.

• Prefilled from the roster. The scheduled shift arrives on the phone as a timesheet with start, finish and site already in. The worker checks it, corrects anything that changed, and submits.
• Submitted from the phone, including offline. Hours are recorded by the person who worked them, at knock-off, in the app they confirm shifts in. On a remote site the timesheet saves on the device and syncs when coverage returns.
• Approved in a queue, not an inbox. Supervisors see what is awaiting approval for their own crews, filtered by client, site or job. Entries edited from the roster carry a marker, clean ones approve in bulk, and an outstanding view lists every worked shift with no timesheet against it.
• An audit trail on every action. Every submission, edit, approval and rejection is stamped to a user and a time, with the original submission kept beside the approved figure.
• Handed to payroll as data. Approved hours flow to the pay run as structured data, the pack downloads to PDF when a client or auditor wants it, and subcontractor hours run through the same queue.

The same boundaries apply as on the template. Humanz records and approves hours. It does not calculate pay, interpret awards or set penalty rates: your payroll does that, from clean hours. It does not use AI to fill in or alter a timesheet, and it does not track anyone’s location. For crews that have outgrown the sheet, the workforce management software page shows how roster, timesheets and approvals sit together; if you are still on paper, start with digital timesheets for tradies.

Frequently asked questions

What should a timesheet template include?

A timesheet template should record, for each day, the start time, the finish time, the unpaid break and the site or job, plus the worker’s name, employment type and signed declaration, and a supervisor’s name, signature and approval date. A total for the week or fortnight belongs at the bottom. A single daily hours figure is not enough, because overtime records need a start and a finish.

Are timesheets a legal requirement in Australia?

Not by that name, but the hours they capture often are. Employers must keep time and wages records for seven years, and for overtime paid at penalty rates or loadings, and for casual or irregular part-time employees paid on time worked, those records must show the hours worked, including when overtime started and finished. A timesheet is the usual way of meeting that.

How long do timesheets need to be kept?

Seven years. Time and wages records must be kept for seven years, remain legible and in English, and be readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector throughout. That includes former employees, so a signed timesheet from a worker who left five years ago is still a live record.

Can a timesheet be a spreadsheet?

Yes. The law sets what a record must contain and how long it must be kept, not the software it lives in. The risk is the rule that records must not be changed except to correct an error, because a shared file that anyone can edit without a history cannot show that a figure was not altered later. A signed, dated sheet with corrections written beside the original entry is on far safer ground.

Do subcontractors need to fill in timesheets?

Usually, yes, though for a different reason than employees. The Fair Work record-keeping obligation attaches to employees, while a subcontractor’s signed timesheet is the evidence behind their invoice and the hours you charge to the job. Running both on the same format gives supervisors one document to sign and keeps how each worker is engaged visible on every sheet.

What is the difference between a timesheet and a roster?

A roster is the plan and a timesheet is the record. The roster says who was meant to work, when and where; the timesheet says what actually happened, including the early finish, the callout and the shift that ran over. A roster cannot stand in as the record of hours worked, because the two diverge wherever shifts change, and that gap is what a pay dispute turns on.

Does the template calculate overtime?

No. The template totals hours worked for the week or the fortnight, and that is where it stops. It does not apply overtime rates, penalty rates, allowances or award rules, and it does not track leave balances. The total exists so your payroll person or payroll software can apply the correct rate to accurate hours.