Excel timesheet template: free download, formulas and limits

An Excel timesheet is a weekly sheet where you enter the start time, end time and break for each day; formulas then work out the hours as a decimal number and add them up by day, by week and by hour type. With the free timesheet template below you have one ready to use, including night shifts past midnight and payable hours. For a small team, Excel is a good place to start, as long as you make sure the record is complete, filled in on time and verifiable.

What goes into an Excel timesheet

A usable timesheet shows, for each employee and week, when they worked, for how long, on what and as which hour type. The template has three tabs: Timesheet, Hour types and How to use. At the top of the Timesheet tab are the employee, employee number, contract hours per week (40 by default), manager and the Monday of the week. Below that are fourteen rows, two per day, so you can split a day between two projects or book part of it as overtime.

You fill in the pale yellow cells; the grey ones calculate themselves. Below the table are the weekly total, your contract hours, the hours above them and the kilometres, with the hours, percentage and payable hours for each hour type to the right. The employee, the manager and, where needed, the client sign at the bottom. The whole sheet prints on one A4 page.

The week number in H6 comes from =IF(H5="","",ISOWEEKNUM(H5)), which follows the ISO 8601 standard: weeks start on Monday, and week 1 is the week containing the first Thursday of the year. The ordinary WEEKNUM function starts weeks on a Sunday by default and treats the week containing 1 January as week 1, which makes Monday 4 January 2027 week 2 instead of week 1.

Using the Excel timesheet template in six steps

1. 1Set up your hour types. Download the template and, on the Hour types tab, replace the examples with the hour types and percentages from your collective agreement or employment contract. A new hour type on an empty row appears in the drop-down list and in the totals automatically.
2. 2Fill in the header. Name, employee number, contract hours, manager and the Monday of the week; the sheet only accepts a Monday. Dates, days and the week number follow automatically.
3. 3Save a copy per employee per week under a consistent file name, such as Timesheet 2026-W44 Smith.xlsx. With two digits for the week (W09) the files sort in order. Note that 2026 has 53 weeks, and week 53 runs from Monday 28 December 2026 to Sunday 3 January 2027.
4. 4Have hours filled in daily. Hours that are only filled in on Friday are estimates.
5. 5Check anything orange. More than 12 hours in a day or more than 60 hours in a week is above the standard limits of the Dutch Working Hours Act (Arbeidstijdenwet), and hours without an hour type are left out of the payable hours.
6. 6Have it signed off and keep the records. Keep a PDF or scan of the signed sheet alongside the Excel file. In the Netherlands, employers must record the hours worked and keep records of working and rest times for at least 52 weeks. Hours that support pay or invoices are part of your accounting records, which Dutch tax law requires you to keep for seven years.

What the law requires and who it applies to is covered in whether time tracking is mandatory; how to set up sign-off so that it stands up to scrutiny, in timesheet sign-off.

Calculating hours in Excel: the formula step by step

The calculation sits in column F. Cell F9 contains:

=IF(OR(C9="",D9=""),"",MAX(0,ROUND(MOD(D9-C9,1)*24-E9/60,2)))

A Dutch-language version of Excel shows Dutch function names; whether commas or semicolons separate the arguments depends on your regional settings. Working from the inside out:

• MOD(D9-C9,1) subtracts the start from the end. Excel stores a time as a fraction of a day (06:00 is 0.25, 18:00 is 0.75); MOD keeps the part within a single day, even when the difference is negative.
• Times 24 turns that into hours: 0.25 of a day is 6 hours.
• Minus E9/60 deducts the break, converted from minutes to hours: 30 minutes is 0.5 hours.
• ROUND(…,2) rounds to two decimal places, clearing the tiny rounding errors that arise because Excel calculates with binary numbers.
• MAX(0,…) keeps the result at zero or above, for example when the break entered is longer than the time worked.
• IF(OR(C9="",D9=""),"",…) leaves the cell empty as long as the start or end is missing. Without that check, a row with only a start time of 07:00 would count as 17.00 hours.

The day total in K9, merged with K10, is =IF(AND(F9="",F10=""),"",SUM(F9:F10)); SUM skips the empty text in column F. The diagram below shows three rows from the template with their results, and the night shift calculation written out.

A night shift past midnight

Night shifts are a regular part of technical work, whether for a breakdown or during a shutdown. Take the shift from the diagram: Tuesday 22:00 to Wednesday 06:30, with a 30-minute break. End minus start is 06:30 − 22:00 = −15.5 hours, or −0.6458 of a day to Excel. Without MOD, the formula would come to −15.5 − 0.5 = −16 hours, and MAX(0,…) would turn that into 0.00: a night's work that disappears. MOD adds one whole day, which leaves 8.5 hours; minus the half-hour break, that is 8.00 hours.

Put a shift like this on the row for the day it starts. MOD works for shifts shorter than 24 hours, which is plenty: the Dutch Working Hours Act allows a maximum of 12 hours per shift as standard. The other limits, such as rest periods and averages over several weeks, are set out in time tracking for technicians.

Decimal hours or hours and minutes

Excel can show time worked in two ways: as a time (8:30) or as a decimal number (8.50). The template works in decimal hours, which is why the formula multiplies by 24. Decimal hours are easier to calculate with: you can multiply them directly by a percentage or an hourly rate, and totals above 24 hours simply keep counting.

The catch is that minutes look different: 8 hours 50 minutes is 8.83 hours, not 8.50, and a quarter of an hour is 0.25. This table helps when you check the figures:

If you prefer hours and minutes, calculate in times and give the totals the [h]:mm format. The square brackets make Excel keep counting past 24 hours; how to set this up is covered in the questions at the end.

Hour types and payable hours with SUMIF

Not every hour is paid at the same rate. The Hour types tab gives examples: Normal hours 100%, Overtime 125%, Overtime 150%, Sundays and public holidays 200% and Travel time 100%, plus three empty rows. In the Netherlands, the hour types and percentages that apply to you come from your collective agreement or employment contract, not from the law. How to record overtime is covered in recording overtime.

You pick the hour type in column G from a drop-down list, created with data validation: Data > Data Validation, choose List under Allow and enter the range of hour types under Source ('Hour types'!$A$4:$A$11). That stops variations such as "overtime" or "OT 125", which are not recognised as the same hour type when the hours are added up.

Below the table on the right, SUMIF adds up the hours for each hour type. For the first hour type, I25 contains:

=IF(H25="","",SUMIF($G$9:$G$22,H25,$F$9:$F$22))

SUMIF looks in G9:G22 for the rows with the hour type in H25 and adds up their hours from column F; the dollar signs keep the ranges fixed when you copy the formula down. The payable hours are then the hours times the percentage. In the example from the diagram, Monday has 2.00 hours of Overtime 125%: that makes 2.50 payable hours.

There are also two checks. Below the hour types, the figure next to No hour type (I33) turns orange as soon as there are hours without an hour type, because those are not included in the total payable hours. Below the table on the left, Hours above contract hours (F26) uses MAX(0,F24-F25) to show how far the week goes over the contract hours; whether an hour counts as overtime depends on your collective agreement or employment contract.

How to limit errors in your timesheet

A spreadsheet lets you type almost anything, and that is where the risk lies. Three measures help:

• Restrict the input. The template also uses data validation for start and end (a time), the break (whole minutes from 0 to 720), the Monday of the week and the kilometres (not negative). Type 7.30 instead of 7:30 and you get an error message. If you finish at midnight, enter 00:00, not 24:00.
• Protect the formulas. The template is not protected, so you can adapt it. To stop anyone typing over a formula by accident, clear the Locked box for the yellow cells (Format Cells, Protection tab) and then protect the sheet with Review > Protect Sheet. A password is optional; even without one, nobody types over a formula by mistake any more.
• Keep one file per week. One file per employee per week makes signing off, retaining and, once the retention period is over, deleting straightforward.

Where Excel falls short for time tracking

Excel is flexible and everyone knows it. But time records also have to stand up to checks afterwards, and that is where the limits are:

• No change history with reasons. Changing a time overwrites the old one. In a file on your own drive, nobody can see what changed or who changed it; in the cloud you can see that, but never why. It is precisely a correction with a reason, with the original kept, that makes records trustworthy.
• Filling in after the fact. The later hours are entered, the more the timesheet becomes a reconstruction. In 2015 the Dutch Council of State ruled that a reconstruction does not count as an accurate, regularly updated record (ruling 201405073/1/A3, in Dutch). The employer in that case had thrown away the original record once the hours were in the payroll system, and later submitted a reconstruction based on the payroll records.
• Merging separate files. Twelve technicians times 52 weeks is 624 files a year. Anyone who wants an overview per project or month copies totals across, and every copy is a chance to make a mistake.
• Formulas that break. One value pasted over a formula, or a row outside the range of the totals, and the weekly total is wrong without anyone noticing.
• No approval step. Approval comes on paper or by email; who approved what, and when, is something you track yourself.
• Privacy. A timesheet holds personal data. Files sent round as attachments or kept in an open folder are hard to protect, while the GDPR requires appropriate security and that you keep data no longer than necessary.
• Only daily and weekly limits. The template flags more than 12 hours in a day and more than 60 hours in a week, but not the rest between two shifts or the averages over 4 and 16 weeks.

When an app is a better fit than Excel

Excel suits a small team with regular hours, one manager and hours that mainly go to payroll. Every extra location and client adds to the time spent collecting and chasing hours.

Other signals:

• Technicians work at changing locations and only fill in their hours at the end of the week.
• Clients have to sign off hours per project, ideally on the day.
• You want to spot exceptions quickly, such as a missing end time or a 14-hour shift.
• Hours go to payroll as well as to invoicing.

A time tracking app can record the time as it happens, keep corrections with a reason and handle approval without files going back and forth. What to look for when choosing one is covered in choosing a time tracking app. What a weekly timesheet looks like when the hours come from an app is shown on the page about time tracking in TimeQeeper. If you are still unsure, start with the template: what you agree on hour types, breaks and sign-off carries over when you switch.