Monthly submission, manager review, and what closing a month locks.
Synthelio closes time monthly. Each person submits their month, a manager approves it, and once the month is closed the hours in it are fixed.
The workflow exists so that the numbers everything else is built on stop moving at a known point. Invoices, margin reports, and utilization all assume the underlying hours are settled.
When your entries for the month are complete, submit the timesheet. That moves it out of the open state and hands it to your manager.
Check two things before you submit, because both are easier to fix now than after approval. Are there days with no entries that should have some, and is anything double counted, particularly if some of your hours arrive from Jira.
Submitting is not the same as the month being closed. Your timesheet is submitted; the month closes when the whole cycle is done.
You can see submission state across your team: who has submitted, who has not, and how much each person has logged.
Approval is worth treating as a real review rather than a formality. A timesheet with a suspiciously round shape, forty hours split evenly across five days with no notes, is usually a reconstruction rather than a record. A person showing far fewer hours than their allocation implies is worth a question, because that gap is often an engagement problem rather than a logging problem: people allocated to an engagement and not billing to it is one of the most expensive and least visible margin leaks there is.
Late timesheets are the most common reason a month-end drags, and the honest fix is a habit rather than a feature.
Synthelio can notify people about timesheet events through Slack, and those notifications are always direct messages, never channel posts. That is a deliberate choice. A public list of who has not submitted creates a dynamic that makes people defensive rather than prompt, and chasing is a conversation between a manager and a person.
If you want a rhythm that works: a reminder two working days before your close date, and a short list to managers on the close date. Anything more frequent becomes noise people learn to ignore.
Once a month is closed, entries in it cannot be added, edited, or deleted by anyone through normal means. Attempting to log into a closed month is refused.
This is the point of the workflow rather than an inconvenience. If hours can keep changing after a month has been invoiced and reported, then every number produced from that month has a shelf life and nobody can tell you which version is correct.
They happen. Someone forgets two days, or a whole engagement's worth of hours went to the wrong code.
These are handled by whoever administers your month-end rather than by the person who made the mistake, and that is appropriate: reopening a closed month has consequences for anything already built on it, including invoices that may already have gone out.
Decide in advance what your firm does about a correction found after invoicing. The usual answers are to adjust on the next invoice or to absorb it, and having decided beforehand is much better than negotiating it in the moment.
Can I submit a partial month? You can submit whenever you choose, but submitting before the month is over means anything logged afterward has to be handled as a change.
Can a manager edit someone's entries? No. Time entry writes are always self-writes. A manager approves or sends back, they do not rewrite.
What if someone leaves mid-month? Get their timesheet submitted before their access is deactivated. Once the account is off, they cannot log anything.
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