How to keep a construction site timesheet: Excel example, half-day and overtime rules

End of the month. The subcontractor’s lead hand opens his notebook: “I’ve put down 23 days for Mehmet this month.” Your sheet shows 21 days. The record of two days was left in a WhatsApp message, a phone call and two people’s memories; nobody knows who got it wrong. The subcontractor trusts his notebook and you trust your sheet; you are both honest, but there is no shared record. A construction site timesheet is a table that shows, day by day, whether each person or subcontractor crew worked a full day or a half day on site and how many hours of overtime they did. A well-built sheet does not so much make the sums easier as keep this argument small from the start.

Below we give the columns, the half-day and overtime rules and the steps for keeping the sheet in Excel. Payroll calculation is not the subject of this article; the timesheet is the input to payroll.

Which columns should a construction site timesheet have?

How do you show half days and overtime on a timesheet?

Put three decisions in writing from the start: what a half day counts as (most companies count it as 0.5), after what time work counts as overtime, and whether overtime is added to the day value. These are your company’s rules; the sheet only applies them. How overtime pay is calculated is a job for payroll; the timesheet only carries the hours. In the example below the working day is taken as 08:00–18:00.

How do you separate your own staff and subcontractor crews in the same sheet?

You can track your own staff person by person and subcontractor crews by crew where needed; the sheet can handle both together. If a crew row has no list of names, the headcount and work status are enough, but if you will reconcile with the subcontractor name by name at the end of the month, you need to record the names too. Whichever you choose, keep the employer column filled in; the month-end summary comes from it. The week below is fictional; values are person-days and a half day is counted as 0.5.

The zeros on Thursday do not mean “nobody came”; work stopped because of rain. If this difference is not written in the notes, blank days and absences get mixed up at the end of the month. Tuesday’s 2 is the equivalent of the four members of the rebar crew working half a day; when the sheet shows this calculation clearly, nobody has to ask later “why does it say 2?”

How do you keep a site timesheet in Excel, step by step?

1. Open a single worksheet for the month; put people and crews in the rows and the days of the month in the columns.
2. Have people and subcontractor names picked from a separate list, so that three different spellings of the same person do not split the total.
3. Allow only 1, 0.5 or blank in the day cells; use data validation to reject any other value.
4. Keep overtime in hours in a second block or on a second sheet, without mixing it with the day count.
5. At the end of each row, calculate total days and total overtime with the SUM function.
6. For a summary by subcontractor, use a PivotTable or SUMIF; compare day totals, not headcounts.
7. When the month closes, save the file with the date and have the people concerned sign it; if a change is needed later, create a new version.

Once the structure is set up, the real discipline lies in when entries are made. Enter the timesheet at the end of the day, taking the information from the person who reported that day; every entry left until the next morning wipes out some of the previous day’s detail. If you have several sites, opening a separate sheet for each and merging them on one summary sheet at the end of the month also makes people’s moves between sites visible. If more than one person edits the file, keep the version history switched on so it shows who changed what.

Weak points of an Excel timesheet and common mistakes

An Excel timesheet works well when it is kept with rules; in a small team, with one foreman and daily entries, there may be no problems at all. Mistakes usually come not from the sheet itself but from the information that goes into it:

• A message arrives late and is entered against the wrong day.
• The timesheet is filled in from memory at the end of the month, not during the day.
• The same person is counted twice across two sites, or not counted at all.
• The crew total does not match the list of people: it says “12 people” but there are eleven names.
• The half-day rule varies from person to person; verbal exceptions such as “this tradesman counts as a full day even if he works until noon” never make it into the sheet.
• The sheet is updated but the source message is not kept; when a discrepancy arises, there is no evidence left.

Construction timesheet software: what does SahaSesi AI do?

SahaSesi AI turns messages that foremen and tradespeople send on WhatsApp, such as “Structural crew 12 people, rebar crew 4 people half day”, into timesheet records per person or per subcontractor crew; half days and overtime are kept separately. The record is read back to the foreman as “Logged: …”, and if it is wrong, the foreman corrects it. If a site’s timesheet has not arrived by the reminder time, its foreman gets a reminder on WhatsApp. The monthly timesheet can be downloaded as an Excel file, per person and per subcontractor, day by day, with half days and overtime.

Let us be clear about the limit: SahaSesi AI does not calculate payroll, and we do not claim integration with payroll or time-and-attendance systems. How you connect the Excel output to your payroll process is something to plan separately. For details on working out person-days from a message, see our article Construction site timesheet: working out person-days from a WhatsApp message.

If your numbers differ from the subcontractor’s at the end of the month

Discrepancies are normal; what matters is being able to find where they arose. First make sure both sides counted by the same rule: were half days and overtime written down in the same way? Then look only at the days that differ and open the source record for each of them. If records were kept daily and every change leaves a trail, the argument shifts from “whom do we believe?” to “who reported what that day?”, and that is settled much faster.

1. Align the rules: Were half days, overtime and days of leave written down the same way on both sides?
2. List the days that differ: Look only at the days that do not match; do not recount the whole month.
3. Open the source record: Go to that day’s message, photo or the crew lead’s report.
4. Write the outcome in the notes: If a correction was made, record the reason and the date, and save the sheet as a new version.

If you would like to extract timesheets automatically from WhatsApp messages and receive them as a monthly Excel file, you can schedule a pilot meeting on the SahaSesi AI page. SahaSesi AI is being rolled out on its first sites through a pilot programme.