Time Cards. Simplified

Time cards are important for very obvious reasons: workers need to get paid the proper wage for the hours they worked or the salary they agreed to and a lack of proper timekeeping and pay bumps and penalties for payroll processing can result in a lawsuit. Almost every business has a form of time card and brief training on how their system works and allowed break times (paid and unpaid). Most of the time, there’s a time clock attached to a wall in the break room. But the entertainment industry poses a very specific challenge to accurate timekeeping. There are thousands of different rates, weird hours, unique rates for overtime hours, tracking AM/PM hours accurately, pay bumps, travel pay, meal penalties, stipends, and so on. Not to mention, most shoots are on location, which only adds to the mess of tracking employee’s time.

Topsheet’s time card is easy to use and you can: track your crew’s hours, add adjustments, add union standards, create your own standards for groups or individuals, sign and approve with ease. But here’s the really cool part: we have removed the need for long lines at the end of the day to have timesheets approved. Wait, what? Yeah, you read that correctly. NO MORE LINES. How? I’ll tell you:

How Our Time Cards Work

The admin, usually the UPM, can choose to set time card standards by selecting “departments,” “individuals” or “everyone” for the cast and crew members. Simply select the group or individuals you are creating the time cards for and add in: start time, meal times (beginning and end), adjustments for speaking lines or smoke (etc.) and wrap time. Then send it off to the selected groups or individuals to sign. If they agree that the information is correct, they sign it and send it back for the admin to approve.

All signed time cards with no adjustments made by the crew will appear with a green dot next to it for the admin to quickly approve. For the time cards that any crew member did not sign because they requested an adjustment for a speaking line or something that wasn’t stated on their time card, a yellow dot will appear next to their name, so the admin can check it and either make the adjustments and approve or remove the request (if it was incorrect) and then approve.

However, if the admin chooses not to set the standard, at wrap, the UPM can announce all of the time card information for the cast and crew to add in themselves on their mobile devices, sign and submit it for approval from their phones, still removing the need for long lines and wasted time, pens, paper, and other office products. The admin can then approve each time card and make adjustments as necessary. Using Topsheet for time cards makes tracking employee hours as easy as pie. Once you submit the online time cards, our time card calculator will do the rest. Just make sure to have all the time cards completed before the next shoot day!

What Sets Topsheet's Time Cards Apart

There are several entertainment payroll companies that have started to enter into the digital future by creating paperless options for time cards ( EP, Cast and Crew ), so what makes Topsheet so unique?

Besides: the free cost to use our time card feature, no need to re-enter personal information, digital sign and a quick reference to see which time cards are approved and signed and which have not, Topsheet is the only entertainment payroll company to offer standard-setting. And it’s a game-changer, y’all. You can have all the time cards ready to sign minutes after wrap. It’s a dream come true.