HR & Time Tracking Templates for Google Sheets

Hours are the rawest HR data and the easiest to lose. This section covers time tracking and HR templates for Google Sheets — timesheets, payroll records, leave balances — as free .xlsx downloads that open in Google Sheets or Excel. They suit teams small enough that dedicated HR software would be more system than staff.

Timesheet templates by pay period

Timesheets follow the payroll calendar, so the templates come in the cadences payroll uses: weekly and biweekly grids for hourly teams, a monthly timesheet for salaried ones, and a daily layout when work is billed in blocks of hours. Pick the one matching your pay period and the totals land where the pay run expects them — hours per row, summed per period, overtime split out.

Employee time tracking in a shared sheet

Google Sheets earns its keep here through sharing: each employee fills in their own tab, a summary tab collects the totals, and nobody emails around an Excel file with final-v3 in the name. Lock the formula cells, leave the hour cells open, and the sheet survives a year of fingers. For approval, a status column — submitted, approved — does the job a workflow tool charges for.

Payroll, pay stubs and PTO records

Around the timesheet sit the records it feeds: a payroll sheet that lines up gross pay, deductions and net per period; pay stub layouts that document one employee's pay period on one page; and PTO balances that count days accrued against days taken, so August requests are arithmetic instead of archaeology. As record-keeping tools they hold whatever rates and rules you enter — what those rules should be is a matter between you, your jurisdiction and your advisor, not the spreadsheet.

How to choose a time tracking template for Google Sheets

Match the template to the question you answer most often. Billing clients by the hour? You need per-project rows more than per-employee ones. Running payroll? The pay-period grid matters and the rest is decoration. Just proving the hours happened? The simplest weekly sheet wins, because the one that gets filled in beats the one that is theoretically complete. The money those hours become is handled under accounting & bookkeeping templates, and the opening guide covers the .xlsx-to-Google-Sheets step.