Enter your idea

Strongly support this idea.

We currently have staff entering time in both Payroll Timesheets and Xero Projects, which creates unnecessary duplicate data entry and increases the risk of inconsistencies, omissions and administrative overhead.

For many businesses, Payroll Timesheets are the source of truth because they capture start times, finish times, breaks, ordinary hours, overtime and payroll-compliant attendance records. In comparison, Projects is where labour is allocated for costing, reporting and invoicing.

Rather than requiring employees to maintain two separate sets of time records, we would like to see Payroll and Projects integrated more closely.

Ideally a payroll integrated workflow would allow:

Employee completes their Payroll Timesheet.
Employee allocates timesheet entries to one or more Projects.
During the approval process, managers can review, add or correct project allocations if they have been missed.
Once the timesheet is approved, the approved hours automatically flow into Xero Projects.
Project costing, reporting and invoicing are then based on the approved payroll records.

This would allow employees to enter their time once while ensuring both Payroll and Projects remain aligned.

It is also important that the solution supports different methods of time allocation depending on the organisation's requirements.

Some businesses need detailed time tracking and should be able to allocate individual timesheet entries to projects throughout the day. For example:

8:00am - 10:00am → Project A
10:00am - 10:30am → Break
10:30am - 1:00pm → Project B
1:00pm - 1:30pm → Break
1:30pm - 5:00pm → Project C

Other businesses may prefer a simpler allocation model where approved hours are assigned to projects at the end of a period, for example:

Weekly allocation
Fortnightly allocation
Monthly allocation

Example:

Employee A worked 38 hours this week
Project A = 20 hours
Project B = 10 hours
Project C = 8 hours

This flexibility would allow organisations to choose the level of detail that best suits their operational and reporting requirements.

To maintain data integrity, approved and processed records should also be protected from accidental changes. Once a payroll period has been processed, or project time has been invoiced, the linked records should be locked. Where a genuine correction is required, an authorised user could perform an override and have any approved adjustment synchronised between Payroll and Projects.

The key objective is simple: staff should only need to enter their time once. Payroll Timesheets should capture attendance, breaks and payroll information, while Xero Projects should receive the approved labour allocations automatically. This would significantly reduce double handling, improve project costing accuracy, and provide a far better experience for both employees and managers.