failure
What Happens When a Timesheet Was Never Approved?
It becomes an approval-missing exception — its own class, reported separately from hours and rate mismatches — and it blocks clean status for that employee until someone with authority approves or the period's owner decides otherwise. Silence from a manager is treated as what it is: an open question, not agreement with whatever the register drafted. Missing source fields become named failures; hours and rates are never invented. Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments.
Why approvals get their own class
An hours mismatch means two records exist and disagree — a comparison problem. A missing approval means the second record does not exist yet — a process problem. Collapsing them hides which fix applies: mismatches go back to whoever keeps time; missing approvals go to whoever was supposed to sign.
There is also an integrity case that is neither: an approval that changed after lock, or an alert suggesting tampering. Those stop ordinary review entirely and escalate with their audit reference, because continuing to compare numbers on top of a compromised trail would lend the output false credibility.
What to bring
Bring the approval workflow facts for the period: who approves whose time, when locks happen, and which approvals arrived. Bring the register too — the goal is to resolve the gap before the run, with full context.
If an approver is unreachable, note the escalation path your organization actually uses. The review names the gap; filling it is an organizational act.
Step 1: Confirm it is missing, not misfiled
Check whether the approval exists under a different period, project, or approver before treating it as absent. The review rejects cross-project records rather than guessing, so a wrong-scope file looks like absence until someone checks.
Step 2: Name it precisely
approval-missing attaches to the specific employee in the specific period, separate from any other findings on the same record. One employee can carry an hours mismatch and a missing approval at once; each stays visible with both source values where values exist.
Step 3: Route to the approver with the draft beside it
Send the approver the drafted values alongside the request, so signing off is a decision about real numbers rather than a blind confirmation. What the approver must never do is approve hours no record supports.
Step 4: Watch for the integrity line
If an alert appears — an approval changed after lock is the classic case — ordinary review stops there. The alert and its audit reference are preserved for a human; the register is not scored as if nothing happened.
Step 5: Close the loop before the run
Re-review once approvals land; recovery merges prior findings so nothing is lost. Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments — the closed loop ends in a specialist's decision, made with every gap either filled or explicitly accepted.
Verification
The resolution shows three things: the originally missing approval now present (or the delay explicitly accepted), the re-reviewed exception list, and the final state per employee. An employee who cleared while still carrying approval-missing did not clear — the class exists precisely so that cannot slip through quietly.
Limits that stay in this failure mode
Missing source fields become named failures; hours and rates are never invented. No manager's memory, prior-period average, or urgency fills an unapproved value.
Payrune never calculates pay or tax, modifies payroll, or releases payments. Resolving the gap produces better information for the specialist; it never becomes a payroll action by itself.
What Payrune does in this failure mode
Payrune keeps three kinds of trouble from blurring together: value mismatches with both figures recorded, missing approvals named per employee, and integrity alerts that halt review and escalate with their audit reference.
On recovery, checkpointed findings merge with new data, so chasing down late approvals never erases earlier exceptions elsewhere on the list.
FAQ
Questions this guide is for
Can an approval be backdated into the review?
The approval record enters as supplied input; the review then reflects it. The workspace itself never fabricates or edits approval records.
What if the same employee also has a rate mismatch?
Both findings appear, in stable order, each with its own class and values. Fixing one does not silently clear the other.
Is an approval changed after lock just another exception?
No — it stops ordinary review. Integrity alerts escalate to a human with the audit reference preserved instead of joining the exception list.
Start in the workspace
Name the gap honestly
Sign in from this page with the period's approved records and draft register. The missing approval becomes a named exception — never an assumption.