Timesheet Software for CA and Accounting Firms: Hours per Client and Vendor

The problem is not arithmetic. It is structure. One staff member may work for three clients in a week, and each client has its own manager who should approve those hours. A single shared sheet cannot route approvals by client, so approval collapses into one person checking everything, or nobody checking anything.

The second problem is timing. Hours typed up on Friday for the whole week are reconstructed hours. By the time the entries reach the billing sheet, the vendor name is abbreviated, the client is guessed, and a few hours have quietly dropped out. Those dropped hours are unbilled work, and they never come back.

The third problem is proof. When a client questions a bill, the firm needs to show who worked, on which vendor, on which days, and who approved it. A row in a spreadsheet is not an audit trail.

• Two levels of structure. Client first, then vendor under the client, so every hour lands in the right bucket without typing a long label.
• Staff pick the vendor when they start work. Attribution at the moment of work, not reconstruction on Friday.
• Approval by the right manager. Hours logged against a client's vendor go to that client's manager, even when the same person works for several clients.
• One billing sheet per client. Hours per vendor per person, approved and pending shown separately, exportable.
• Findable at scale. With a hundred vendors, a single flat list is unusable. You need to filter by client.

The numbers below are illustrative, not customer data. Picture a senior associate who works for three clients in a month: a textile manufacturer, a pharma distributor and a food processor. Each client has several vendors whose ledgers and reconciliations she handles.

On a spreadsheet, she writes her hours for the week on Friday, in one row per day, with an abbreviated vendor name and a client she remembers. Three different managers each need to approve a slice of that row, so in practice one partner approves everything on trust, or approval waits until month end.

With sessions, she starts work on a vendor under the textile client in the morning, stops when she switches to a pharma vendor after lunch, and starts again on a food vendor late in the day. Three sessions, three vendors, three clients, attributed at the moment of work. The textile hours go to the textile client's manager, the pharma hours to that client's manager, and so on. At month end each manager runs the report for their own client and the firm has three billing sheets instead of one disputed row.

• Letting staff log at week end. The vendor and client get guessed. Ask for a session start, not a Friday catch-up.
• Creating every vendor on day one. Start with one client and its active vendors, reconcile the first month, then add the rest.
• One approver for everyone. It becomes a bottleneck and the approver cannot verify work for clients they do not manage. Route approval by client.
• Billing before pending hours are cleared. Check the pending column before you raise any invoice, or you will bill less than you earned and have to chase it later.
• No rule for non-client work. Training, internal meetings and bench time need a home, or they vanish into client buckets and distort every report. Create an internal client for them.

When a business signs up on Workclave it picks a type, and an admin can change it any time in Settings → Workspace. Choosing Accounting / CA firm changes the words on screen: a group of people working together becomes a Client, and the thing people log time against becomes a Vendor. Only the wording changes. The underlying approvals, sessions and reports work the same way.

In practice the setup looks like this:

• Clients. Each client company is set up as a Client, and the firm picks which of its staff work on it.
• Vendors under each client. When a vendor is added under a client, that client's staff are assigned to it automatically, so there is no per-vendor assignment work.
• Logging time. Staff start a session and choose the vendor they are working on, then stop when they switch.
• Approvals. The hours go to that client's manager. Someone who works for three clients gets their time approved by the right manager each time.
• Vendors page. It can be filtered by client, so a hundred vendors do not end up in one long list.

At month end, open Reports → Timesheet by vendor and filter to one client. The report shows hours per vendor per person, split into approved and pending, with a CSV download. Run it once per client and you have one billing sheet per client, built from sessions that were attributed when the work happened.

The approved and pending split matters more than it looks. Pending hours are work done but not yet signed off. Seeing them next to approved hours tells the partner what is safe to bill today and what needs a manager's attention first.

General-purpose timers are built around a flat list of projects and one approver. That is fine for a single team, but a firm with ten clients needs a second level and per-client approval routing, which a flat list does not give you. HR attendance tools are built around who was present, not which vendor the hour belongs to. Spreadsheets give you neither routing nor an audit trail.

Workclave is built around the combination a client-service firm needs: structure by client and vendor, attribution at the start of the session, approval by the owning manager, and a per-client report. If you also want attendance and leave in the same place, they live in the same product, so staff do not run a second tool.

A tool that answers yes to all seven will save a practice real time at month end. One that answers no to the first two will reproduce the spreadsheet problem in a nicer interface.

• Can I have two levels, client and vendor, or only a flat list?
• When a staff member works for three clients, does each client's manager approve their own slice?
• Is the vendor chosen when work starts, or typed in later?
• Can I filter a long vendor list by client?
• Does the report separate approved hours from pending hours?
• Can I export a billing sheet for one client without cleaning it up by hand?
• Will new staff understand the words on screen without training?

Workclave records and reports hours. It does not generate invoices or run your accounting books, so you will still raise the invoice in your accounting software from the billing sheet. And if the only thing you need is a private stopwatch for one person, a basic timer is simpler. Workclave pays off when more than one person logs time and somebody has to approve it.

Workclave is free up to 3 users, then ₹199/user/month with no base fee. Small practices can start on the free tier and move to a paid plan when the team grows. See the pricing page for what each plan includes.

• Create one client and add its staff.
• Add that client's vendors. Staff are assigned automatically.
• Ask the team to start a session on the vendor for one week.
• Approve as a manager, then run the Timesheet by vendor report for that client and compare it with your current sheet.
• Roll out the remaining clients once the first one reconciles.