The Time Approval feature in Productive lets designated time entry approvers review and approve time entries before they are visible to clients or included in budget and profitability reports.
This article covers how approvals work in budgets specifically. For other approval options, see Approving Time: Overview.
Before You Start: Turn on the Time Approval Functionality
To ensure time entries go through the approval process, you first need to enable time approval in your account, organization-wide.
Navigate to Settings > Time Tracking.
Enable the Time Approval toggle.
📌 This setting applies across Productive. Once enabled, time approval can be required not only in budgets but also in deals.
Time Approval for Individual Budgets
Once Time Approval is enabled in Settings, navigate to the budget, open the budget sidebar, and select the Settings tab (marked by the gear ⚙️ icon).
Under Time & Expense Approval, click Edit approval policy to assign approvers for time entries—and, if needed, for expenses logged against services in the same budget.
👉 Read more about expense approvals here.
You can then choose how approvers are assigned:
No Policy: Manually assign one or more approvers for this budget’s time entries. You can choose the budget owner, the manager of the person submitting the entry, the project manager (if the budget is part of a project), or a specific person.
Approval Type: Decide how the assigned approvers need to act:
Any of the listed approvers – only one approver from the list is required.
All of the listed approvers – every assigned approver must approve.
No approval needed – skip the approval process entirely.
Predefined Policy: Select an existing time and expense approval policy, which automatically assigns approvers for both time and expenses to this budget.
📌 Good to Know
If you turn on time approval for a budget after time has already been tracked, those existing entries will automatically show as approved.
This helps keep your reports consistent—but don’t worry, no one manually approved them. It’s just how the system treats past time when approval wasn’t originally required.
Approving Time Entries
The designated approver must approve time entries to ensure they meet the necessary criteria before becoming visible to clients or included in internal reports. Here’s how the process works:
1) Notification and the Approval Inbox
After a time entry is added, the approver receives a notification.
The time entry will appear on the approver's approval inbox, showing entries that are awaiting review.
2) Approval Timeline
Entries logged today won’t appear in the approval inbox until the following day.
Entries logged on future dates become available for approval the day after they are logged.
This delay helps prevent notification overload and gives users time to complete their time entries before they reach approvers.
📌 Note: Even if entries don’t appear in the approval inbox immediately, approvers can still approve them directly from the budget in the Time tab or under Company Time.
3) Actions in the Approval Inbox
✅ Approve the entry
🔄 Request changes
⋮ Edit the entry (date, service, description, hours)
⏱ View timer logs (if the timer was used)
🗑 Delete the entry
4) Recognition and Billability
Only after approval does the logged time become recognized and billable. Only recognized time entries are considered in the budget usage calculations.
If a time entry is not approved and remains unrecognized, it will not affect the total budgeted time.
Changing the Budget Owner, Manager, or the Project Manager for Approvals
The budget owner, project manager (if the budget is part of a project), and the manager of a person submitting the entry are dynamic fields that can be used as approvers for time entries.
To change the manager of a person, go to the person’s profile: Resourcing > Employees > Info tab > Manager.
To change the budget owner, open the budget sidebar and select the General budget info tab (🏠). Click Edit general budget info, select a new budget owner from the dropdown, and then click Update budget to save your changes.
To change the project manager, open the project sidebar and select the General tab (🏠). Click Edit project, select a new project manager from the dropdown, and then click Update project to save your changes.
Related Reading
👉 Time tracked in deals can also require approval. Learn how deal time approvals work.
👉 Employees can formally submit their timesheets for approval before entries are reviewed and recognized. See setting up time entry submissions.