NetSuite timesheets part 1: Data capturing

In this blog series, we look at your options for NetSuite timesheets and give a breakdown of the pros and cons of each approach at the four key stages of managing timesheets:

• Capturing Timesheets
• Processing Timesheets
• Paying Timesheets
• Reporting on Timesheets

This initial article will focus on the first, and arguably most important step, capturing timesheets in NetSuite. 

Key highlights:

• NetSuite timesheets let employees record hours for payroll, billing and projects directly within the platform to keep financial data accurate.
• Accurate time capture improves employee experience, reduces admin time and minimizes errors across the organization.
• Time tracking in NetSuite supports compliance, approvals and payroll confidence by providing audit-ready data and standardized processes.
• Employee Portal by Zone extends native functionality with a hybrid, built-for-NetSuite approach that adds real-world flexibility while keeping everything in one system.

What is a NetSuite timesheet?

NetSuite timesheets are where employees record the actual hours they’ve worked – directly inside Oracle NetSuite – instead of tracking time in spreadsheets or external systems. But it’s more than a digital clock-in sheet.

In practice, NetSuite timesheets connect time entry with projects, payroll and billing. That means every hour logged can automatically drive costs, revenue or payroll calculations without anyone rekeying data.

Why accurate timesheet capture matters

If you want to understand how the labor you’re paying for translates into revenue and productivity, time tracking in NetSuite is essential. Accurate timesheets give managers an overview of their employees' workdays down to the hour and activity. Without them, leaders cannot confidently conduct a cost/benefit analysis on labor. 

Improving the Employee Experience

Timesheet entry is an everyday job, and if we’re being honest, it’s something most employees dread. In the busy, multi-tasking environment of most workplaces, slicing up and summarizing the day into timesheets consumes precious time and brainpower. And it may be something they put off until the end of the week.

When you give your staff tools to make timesheet entry easier, they do it more often and more accurately. They spend less time in spreadsheets and more time on meaningful work.

With Zone’s Employee Portal, NetSuite timesheets have additional capabilities outside of simply tracking work hours. They can provide clear visibility into time off, pay and approvals so employees feel informed and aligned with efficiency KPIs. 

Streamlining Approvals and Reducing Errors

Manual timesheet approvals are the weakest link in payroll and billing cycles, especially when managers have to chase missing entries or verify data from multiple sources. With Zone Employee Portal, every submitted entry routes through approval workflows that mirror your organization’s hierarchy. Managers can review hours directly in NetSuite and approve or reject submissions in seconds.

At the same time, automated validation rules reduce common errors before they become payroll or billing problems. The built-in accuracy check ensures hours flow cleanly from timesheets to invoices and pay runs, no reworks required.

• Automated approval routing
• Validation rules prevent errors
• Approvals directly within NetSuite

Ensuring Compliance and Audit Readiness

Accurate time tracking isn’t just about efficiency, it’s a compliance safeguard. When all time entries, approvals and adjustments live inside NetSuite, finance and HR teams gain a complete, traceable record of activity. That makes it easier to meet labor regulations, internal policies and audit requirements without scrambling for data.

With built-in controls and automatic syncing, Zone keeps records consistent and audit-ready at all times. Every change is logged, every approval tracked, and every report reflects real activity. The result is fewer errors, faster reconciliations and peace of mind knowing compliance is built into the process.

• Clear audit trail
• Built-in compliance rules
• Easy to review data

Supporting Confident Billing and Payroll

Where would we be without reliable timesheets? Finance teams couldn’t confidently pay employees or bill clients for hours worked. So why leave such an important function in disconnected Excel spreadsheets? 

When hours are recorded correctly in NetSuite, money flows smoothly on both sides of the ledger.

With Zone’s native time tracking, approved time data feeds directly into billing and payroll processes. Faster invoicing and fewer disputes will follow. Why force finance to comb through spreadsheets and manually reenter data into NetSuite when employees can put it where it needs to go themselves? 

Key time tracking NetSuite challenges

Managing NetSuite timesheets presents businesses the world over with a cruel combination of challenges:

• Timesheets require non-finance staff to initiate a critical financial process - always a scary proposition!
• They are immensely important to billing and gross pay calculations. It’s essential that the time entered posts to the correct nominal accounts, projects, departments, classes and locations.
• The finance team has complete knowledge and control of all the posting classifications, but no insight into the ‘actual’ time worked.
• The teams entering approved timesheets have all the info on the time worked, but usually little knowledge or understanding of the corresponding financial postings.
• And the cherry on the cake…the time of the people filling in timesheets is valuable, literally – you’re tracking it in a timesheet. Usually, this would mean that you, and they, would rather they were getting on with delivering value-added or billable time rather than completing admin work.

If this resonates, you already know you need a solution that gives workers the ability to enter their time quickly and accurately, within well-defined parameters to ensure that the team can get on with their work, and the finance team retains the level of control they need without having to manually enter every line into the finance system.

The good news is that if you are a NetSuite customer, you are already one step ahead of the pack! Its cloud infrastructure, unified database, workflow engine and reminder portlets provide the perfect platform for businesses that are looking to grow and improve visibility of key data by removing unnecessary manual processes through finance automation. It’s likely in the top two reasons why you selected it in the first place.

NetSuite time tracking: Main methods

Ok, step one. How do you get the time worked into NetSuite? Regardless of the tool you use, this step must be completed, at least in part, by the team who have carried out the time being reported.

The two biggest considerations here are normally:

• Size of Your Workforce: This leads to a simple cost/benefit analysis of the time taken across the organization alongside the margin for error.

• How Your Time Is Managed: Do you operate a stable, consistent calendar and shift pattern with defined increments (e.g., Hourly Rates, Monday-Friday, 9 am-5 pm) or do you have multiple shifts, variable rates and out-of-hours entitlements such as overtime, evening meals, travel allowance, etc?

Timesheets tools are not created equal. They run the gamut from basic spreadsheets to truly connected NetSuite time-tracking solutions. Each option offers a different balance of flexibility, accuracy and control. Understanding how they compare is the first step toward choosing a system that fits the way your business really works.

Microsoft Excel

In all honesty, we would never recommend spreadsheets for timesheets, but we live in the real world and know that sometimes something is better than nothing. So, we should acknowledge it and discuss some of the challenges it presents. 

Pros:

• This would normally be available with no additional license purchase, assuming you have Office or Google Suite
• You have all the flexibility you could wish for to capture the required information
• If you operate from a template, the data can be imported into NetSuite, reducing manual entry and transcription errors

Cons (just a few of them):

• It is not the most secure environment to store employee or customer details
• There is no integration with NetSuite, so all project information, rates, employee details etc. have to be manually entered. This can become very time-consuming, prone to errors and both of these facts multiply exponentially as your volume increases
• They can be deleted or overwritten – either deliberately or accidentally, with limited audit trails

NetSuite Employee Center

Now we’re getting to the good stuff. Using a purpose-built native solution that provides a secure interface for employees to enter timesheet data directly into NetSuite. Perfect, right? Yes, in some scenarios.

Referring back to our initial point, the Employee Center provides a terrific solution for businesses, but there may be some situations where your business rules may not align with how the solution captures approved time.

Pros:

• It’s part of your NetSuite set-up
• You can use both the desktop interface and the NetSuite App to enter time
• All data is controlled by the financial and project setup within NetSuite
• Submissions, sign-offs offs and queries are automatically managed as part of your core NetSuite approvals processes

Not cons, but scenarios which some businesses encounter:

• Employee Center is particularly strong for organizations that work within a well-defined and stable environment. i.e., well-defined projects, with clear tasks, structure and rigid timing classifications (e.g., managing time in hours and days).
• It does not tend to offer flexibility for deviations from standard timesheets, such as overtime or varied working patterns.
• Time is entered as hours worked and does not include things such as start and end times
• Requires users to calculate and classify their own time against different billing items, should they wish to include out-of-hours work or overtime

All-in-all, this is an excellent solution for businesses that have invested in NetSuite for its single data source and interface to manage all core business functions. As with a lot of things in the software world, though, particularly by the time you are investing in a solution like NetSuite, you may need specific functionality that is not available as standard. 

Zone & Co Employee Portal

Normally, when you look to introduce a third-party SuiteApp to manage a process like timesheets or expenses, you often gain functionality in one area at the expense of the management and visibility of data within NetSuite. For example, the new solution is built specifically to manage the process, but it does so standalone, meaning that all of the action happens elsewhere – a new interface and another repository for data. The opposite of why you invested in NetSuite.

This often results in additional expense to take critical data out of your core NetSuite set-up while re-engineering the approval processes and reports you had already invested time and money in within the platform.

As a Built for NetSuite Hybrid App, Employee Portal gives you the best of both worlds.

The solution does manage part of the process externally to NetSuite. However, having taken a ‘NetSuite-first’ approach, Employee Portal exists, uniquely, almost as a sidecar to your system. Everything is still driven by NetSuite, and all data is shared automatically between the systems. This ensures that your users can submit time as you need them to in the real world. 

Employee Portal processes the time entered by users and outputs that data in a format that NetSuite can process — satisfying the needs of business at every stage. This solution also offers options for individual time entries, including pre-defined shift patterns, total hours worked or start and end times.

Pros:

• It functions as part of your NetSuite set-up
• Mobile and desktop versions available
• All data is controlled by the financial and project setup within NetSuite
• Submissions, approvals and queries are automatically managed as part of your core NetSuite approval workflows. Plus, it includes the option to introduce another level of authorization before reaching NetSuite if you wish
• Flexibility to enter and manage time spent based on real-world scenarios of existing NetSuite customers across all industries
• Pre-defined shift patterns, overtime and employee entitlement calculation as standard
• Auto-save functionality to remove the risk of work being lost in the field.

Cons:

• It’s not a NetSuite module, but it is built specifically for and certified by NetSuite as “Built-for-NetSuite,” and only enhances your investment

Employee Portal by Zone is the best timesheet tool for NetSuite

Zone Employee Portal stands at the helm of NetSuite time tracking app options because it’s purpose-built for NetSuite time tracking. It harnesses the power of your ERP and extends it without adding external systems. No other tool gives you the same flexibility in how you track, approve and report time inside NetSuite.

Why Zone Employee Portal leads the pack:

• Seamless NetSuite integration: Built specifically for NetSuite, Zone Employee Portal ensures all timesheet data, approvals and reports stay within one system.
• Flexible time capture options: Supports multiple tracking methods, from daily or weekly entry to project-based logging.
• Streamlined approvals: Automates routing and manager sign-offs.
• Error prevention and compliance: Built-in validation rules catch missing or duplicate entries early.
  Scalable and customizable: Adapts easily to unique business rules, multi-entity structures and evolving time tracking needs.

Compared to spreadsheets or generic tools, Employee Portal keeps your finance data centralized, your approvals efficient and your reporting precise – all within NetSuite, the single source of truth for your company’s financial data.

Book a demo today and see how Employee Portal can enhance how your organization manages NetSuite timesheets.