How to get client timesheet approval as a one-person limited company

Why a one-person company still needs formal sign-off

If you are the only person in your consultancy, approval can feel like paperwork for its own sake. You know the hours are right because you worked them. The client knows roughly what you did. Why involve anyone else before sending the invoice?

Because the invoice is only as strong as the agreement behind it. A client who has approved your hours week by week has already agreed the number before the invoice arrives. A client seeing the total for the first time at month end has a whole month of work to question, and that is exactly when payment slips.

• Approved hours turn the invoice into a formality rather than a negotiation.
• Queries surface in the week they happen, while everyone still remembers the work.
• You have a dated record of who agreed what, if a question comes up months later.
• Many clients require approved timesheets before their accounts team will pay.
• It shows the client the same discipline they would expect from a larger supplier.

The awkward part: you are on both sides

Most timesheet tools assume two different people: an administrator who sets up clients and contracts, and a worker who logs hours. In a one-person company, those are the same person, and tools built for teams can make that surprisingly clumsy.

The common failure is setting everything up as the administrator, then finding there is no obvious way to actually log time. Some tools expect you to create a second account with a different email address, or to invite yourself and switch between logins. That is friction you should not have to accept for something you will do every week.

• You should be able to use one login for both setup and logging time.
• Your own contracts should be the only ones offered when you log hours.
• The client approver should be a separate person on the client side, never you.
• Setup should not require inviting colleagues you do not have.

Setting it up in BillByTime

BillByTime supports this directly. You set up your company once, add yourself as the worker using your own email address, and your account is linked automatically. There is no second login and no invitation to accept. A My Timesheets link then appears in your navigation alongside the admin pages.

The Free Forever plan covers one worker and one client, which is exactly the shape of most one-person consultancies. The setup takes a few minutes and follows the checklist on your dashboard.

• Create your organisation on the Free Forever plan.
• Add your client organisation.
• Add yourself as the worker, using the same email address you signed up with.
• Add the person at the client who will approve your hours as a client manager.
• Create a contract linking you, the client, and that approver, with your rate.
• Open My Timesheets, create this week's timesheet, and submit it for approval.

A weekly routine for getting contractor timesheets approved

The biggest improvement most solo contractors can make is submitting weekly rather than monthly. A week of hours is easy for a client to check and quick to approve. A month of hours invites a meeting.

Keep the routine small enough that you never skip it. Five minutes on a Friday afternoon is enough, and it means that by month end every week is already approved and the invoice total is not a surprise to anyone.

• Log hours daily, or at least before the week ends.
• Submit every Friday, even for a short week.
• Check on Monday that last week was approved, and follow up once if not.
• Invoice from approved hours only, so the figures match what the client agreed.

Common setup mistakes

Most problems in a solo setup come from the approver side rather than your own. Your client manager has to accept their invitation before they can approve anything, and it is easy to assume that has happened when it has not.

• Adding yourself as the worker with a different email address, which creates a separate person instead of linking to your account.
• Naming yourself as the approver. Approval only means something if it comes from the client.
• Not checking that the client manager accepted their invitation. Invitations expire after seven days and can be resent from the Invites page.
• Leaving submission until month end, which recreates the problem approval was meant to solve.
• Having no deputy approver when your client contact is on holiday.

How BillByTime helps

BillByTime is built so a one-person company can run the same approval workflow as a larger consultancy without the overhead. You log time and manage the company from one account, your client approves in the system rather than by email, and every submission and approval is timestamped with who made it.

When you grow, nothing changes except adding worker seats. The contracts, clients, and approval history you built on your own carry straight over.