This article is for company admins. Team members who just need to log time can use How to log your time in Slack or How to log your time by email.

Why timesheets matter

On a federal award, every dollar is a taxpayer dollar, and you need evidence of how your team's time was used. Time drives labor cost, labor drives direct cost, and direct cost drives your whole cost allocation. That's why everyone on the award, founders included, logs time daily.

Every timesheet answers three questions:

Who did the work
What project or activity it supported
How much time was spent

Without that record, the government can't verify how direct and indirect labor were split. With it, moving to Phase II, partnering with prime contractors, and defending your rates all get easier.

What makes a timesheet compliant

Logged daily by the person who did the work.
Complete: all hours worked, not just 40, plus holidays and time off for full-time staff.
Approved by someone else, before payroll runs.
Corrected with a trail: changes are made by the employee, with a note, never silently by a manager.

Forge keeps the audit log for every entry, approval and change. Gusto's time tracking doesn't, which is why your team logs time in Forge.

Set up

We do most of this with you during onboarding:

Invite your team to Forge. Everyone who works on the award needs an account, founders included.
Connect Slack, if you use it. See Admins: How to set up the Slack timesheet bot.
Assign jobs and pre-allocate hours. Each person gets the jobs they work on, with their usual split filled in.
Match your timesheet period to payroll. If you run payroll semi-monthly, use semi-monthly timesheets.
Load your holiday calendar and time off policy.
Turn on reminders and the weekly task digest.

With Slack, the bot messages each person at 5pm and most days they just click submit. Without Slack, we send everyone a weekly email reminder. When you hire someone, invite them in Forge on their first day so their timesheet starts complete.

Jobs and cost pools

Each job feeds a cost pool, so the right job puts labor cost in the right place.

Job	Cost pool	What goes here
Your project(s)	Direct	R&D, building and testing, NSF-required workshops, program officer meetings. One job per funded project.
Holiday, PTO, Sick Pay	Fringe	Federal holidays you offer, vacation and personal days, sick days
G&A or F&A	G&A	Running the company: all-hands, performance reviews, meetings with accounting, HR, legal, IT
IR&D*	G&A	Your own R&D outside the award: internal prototypes, testing, patent work
Project overhead*	Overhead	Project support that isn't billed to the project, like a manager's meeting with a direct report
B&P	Unallowable	Winning new work and funding: Phase II proposals, fundraising, investor meetings, morale events
M&S*	Unallowable	Marketing campaigns, sales outreach

* Only used on certain awards, such as defense contracts.

Approve time

Every timesheet needs a second set of eyes. The approver confirms the hours look right, which is what makes the record credible to an auditor.

Who approves: someone other than the employee, usually their manager. Nobody approves their own timesheet. On a two-person team, you approve each other's.
When: at the end of each timesheet period, before payroll runs.
What to check: every day has hours, the jobs match what the person actually worked on, and holidays and time off are logged.

Open the submitted timesheets in the Forge app.
Review each person's hours by day and job.
Approve it, or send it back with a note on what needs fixing.

Handle corrections

A submitted timesheet has an error

Revoke the approval and send it back. The employee makes the change, adds a note explaining why, and resubmits. Don't edit someone else's hours directly.

Someone missed days

They scroll back in the Forge app and fill them in, with a note that it's a late entry.

You have time from before Forge was set up

Your team can still enter it. If you tracked it somewhere else, send it to us and we'll help load it.

Roll it out to your team

Once jobs are set up, send your team a short note. It lands best coming from a founder, in the Slack channel or email thread where you want questions to go.

Using Slack? Copy the message in Admins: How to set up the Slack timesheet bot. It links your team to How to log your time in Slack.
Using email? Copy the email below. It links your team to How to log your time by email.

Email you can copy

Hi team,

As you may know, we're partly funded by a [NSF SBIR] grant. One condition of the grant is tracking time spent on the project and on general company work, so getting timesheets in accurately and on time matters.

We use Forge to log and approve time. For [month], please log the time you spent on the project in Forge (https://app.goforge.io) so we have a complete record. Please backfill by [date].

Going forward, you'll get a weekly email reminder from Forge. Your hours are pre-allocated, so most days you'll only need to confirm them. This guide covers what to log and which job to pick: https://intercom.help/forge-b180b6a2cd75/en/articles/17359880

If you're unsure which job to use, just reply to this email. Thanks all!

Common questions

Timesheet hours don't match Gusto. Is that a problem?

No. For salaried staff, we allocate pay by the share of time on each job. If someone logs 66 hours with 40 on the project, about 61% of their pay is charged to the award.

Can we log time from before the award start date?

Often, yes. NSF allows pre-award costs up to 90 days before the start date. Log it to the project with a note, and we'll confirm it's allowable for your award.

Do NSF workshops and program officer meetings count as project time?

Yes. NSF expects you to attend, so log them to the award project.

Where does Phase II proposal writing go?

B&P. Not the Phase I project.

Admins: How to manage your team's timesheets