The total at the bottom of a timesheet is a claim, and sooner or later somebody checks it. A client's finance team adds up a month of entries and finds a day that contains eleven billable hours of remembered work. Nobody lied. Somebody worked on two things at once, logged both in full, and the tool added them up without blinking. The invoice is now wrong in the one direction that costs trust, and the person explaining it is you.
It happens because real delivery work overlaps and most time tools pretend it does not. You are on a call for one client while a deployment runs for another. Both matter, both deserve time, and a tool that lets two full-length timers run in parallel has quietly decided that one hour of your afternoon can become two hours of billing.
Even split, by construction
ProjectPoint's time-entry extension allows several timers at once, because that is how the work actually happens, and then it refuses to inflate the result: when more than one timer runs, the wall clock is split evenly among them. The spec's own worked example is the whole idea in four numbers. Start timer A; ten minutes later start timer B; let both run ten more minutes; stop. A gets fifteen minutes, B gets five, and the total is twenty, which is exactly how much time actually passed. The total always equals real elapsed time, not because anyone was careful, but because the arithmetic will not allow anything else.
One click, one row
The same philosophy covers the smaller lie of the double entry. The endpoint SharePoint exposes for writing a list item has no way to recognise a second call as a repeat of the first, so an impatient double click in a lesser tool becomes two identical rows and a double-counted timesheet someone discovers at month end. Here, one click produces one row, and a second click cannot produce a second one, because the duplicate is stopped before the request ever leaves the browser.
Notes that keep up with the hours
An eight-hour entry with a three-word note is a reconciliation argument waiting to happen. The extension expects notes to keep pace with the size of the entry: the more hours a row claims, the more description it takes to save it. Because the note is written in the side panel while the work is still on screen, meeting that bar costs seconds, and what lands in the record reads like a billing narrative rather than a shrug. Where a project genuinely does not need descriptions, its own project list can say so, and the rule steps aside for exactly those projects.
The timer that ran all weekend
Honest tooling also plans for the dishonest-looking accident. Everyone eventually leaves a timer running over a weekend and comes back to a sixty-six hour entry. Fixing it is one edit to the total, not a card-by-card archaeology session. The date stays the day the work actually happened, a Friday timer saved on Monday belongs to Friday, and a deleted entry goes to the site recycle bin rather than into thin air, so a mistake can be restored by a site owner instead of argued about.
Numbers that survive scrutiny
Add it up and the result is quiet: a timesheet where the total equals the time that actually passed, where no row exists twice, where big entries carry real descriptions, and where the history of a correction is recoverable. Finance stops re-deriving the numbers, clients stop finding eleven-hour days, and the team spends less time defending time entries and more time driving the business forward.
Get in touch, and we will show you a timesheet total you do not have to re-check.
