Short version: approvals stall across many sites because the approval step is designed for someone at a desk, and site supervisors aren’t at one. Move approval onto the phone they already carry, send reminders automatically instead of by hand, give the person running payroll one place to see what’s still outstanding, and make sure the hours being approved were accurate in the first place.
Why approvals get harder with every site you add
One site with one supervisor is a simple chain: they see who worked, they sign off, done. Spread the same task across ten sites and it stops being about any one supervisor’s diligence and becomes a coordination problem.
Every site manager has their own rhythm. Some check messages first thing; some only when chased. None of that is a character flaw — approving timesheets isn’t their main job. From head office, the result is a pile of outstanding approvals with no easy way to tell which are genuinely stuck and which just haven’t been looked at.
And the classic workflow — an emailed timesheet waiting for a reply — is exactly the wrong shape for someone who spends the day on site. Nobody checks email on a roof.
A typical Thursday
Picture an operations manager running crews across twelve sites for six clients. By Thursday afternoon, four sites are approved, three supervisors have seen the request but not actioned it, and five haven’t responded at all. Working through it by hand means a contact list, texts to the stalled three, calls to the silent five, and the same again on Friday morning. By early afternoon payroll has to run whether or not every site has signed off — which means either a late pay run or hours pushed through without a genuine approval behind them.
What a workable multi-site approval process needs
- Approval from a phone, not a desk. If signing off means sitting at a computer, it happens whenever the supervisor next sits down — which on a busy day might be after payroll has closed.
- Reminders that send themselves. Chasing slow approvers by hand eats a coordinator’s week and gets skipped on a busy one.
- One place to see what’s outstanding. Whoever runs payroll shouldn’t have to ring each site to find out what’s still pending.
- Hours worth approving. An approval is only as good as the hours behind it. If the times were typed from memory, the signature is decoration on a number nobody checked.
How OnCrew handles multi-site approvals
Supervisors approve from the app they already use
With the OnCrew supervisor app, supervisors review and approve hours on their phone — the same app they use to request crew. A supervisor standing on site can sign off in the time it takes to read a message, instead of waiting until they’re back at a laptop.
Reminders go out automatically
OnCrew can text supervisors who have hours waiting for their approval, and can follow up with a voice call if they stay outstanding — both set per agency. The routine chase stops being anyone’s job.
The office sees the timesheet pipeline
In OnCrew’s Command Centre, admins see the timesheet pipeline by status — submitted and waiting, approved, rejected or amended — and can filter it by client or by worker. Each sheet shows the worker, the client and the hours, so finding what’s still outstanding for a particular client is one filter rather than a round of phone calls.
Being precise about what that view is: it’s a pipeline of timesheets by status, filterable by client or worker. It isn’t a separate per-site league table of which supervisor has or hasn’t signed off — the reminders take care of nudging the responsible supervisor, and the pipeline shows you what’s left.
The hours behind each approval are captured, not remembered
Workers clock in on their phone, checked against the site’s location, and times are recorded to the minute in the site’s local time. A clock-in from outside the site boundary is flagged for the office to review. What a supervisor approves reflects what was recorded on site rather than a remembered start time.
Approved hours go straight to payroll
Once hours are approved they export as a payroll-ready file for Employment Hero, MYOB, or Xero via the UpSheets bridge. Each site and its supervisors are recorded against the client, so there’s no mystery about whose sign-off a sheet is waiting on.
What this removes
The weekly routine this replaces is familiar to anyone who’s run payroll across more than a couple of sites: an email to ten supervisors, a few replies, phone calls to the rest, then a deadline that slips because two sites never came back. That doesn’t disappear through a sterner email. It disappears when approval takes a supervisor thirty seconds on their phone, reminders go out without anyone sending them, and the outstanding sheets are visible without asking around.
For a business with a handful of sites, it’s an annoyance. For one running crews across dozens of sites and several clients — the situation our guide to multi-depot workforce scheduling covers — it’s the difference between a pay run that happens on schedule and one at the mercy of whoever is slowest to check their phone.
