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A full timesheet architecture and no attendance module. The most instructive part of this engagement is what was deliberately left out, and why Interloop did not propose it.
Client
Esse
Location
Published
October 2026
Reading Time
7 min read
Implement Zoho People with a complete project and job-level timesheet architecture and no presence tracking — building one authoritative measure of time rather than two that would need reconciling.
Esse engaged Interloop to implement core HR alongside a full timesheet system: project templates, job templates, job-to-project mapping, timesheet policies including employee-specific rules, and approval configuration. Attendance was excluded from scope by agreement. The engagement covered onboarding, employee database, leave, exit and organisation setup alongside the timesheet architecture, delivered in a single phase with hypercare through go-live and admin enablement at handover.
Attendance and timesheet are often implemented together, and they answer different questions. Attendance records whether someone was present. Timesheet records what their time was spent on. For a business that costs or bills work against projects, the second is the measure with commercial meaning. Running both introduces a question nobody benefits from answering — what happens when the two disagree about the same week — and resolving it requires a rule that has no natural basis. One of the two then tends to become the one people maintain and the other the one they tolerate. The engagement therefore turned on a scoping decision rather than a configuration one: build the measure that appears on a project cost report, and decline the other. The follow-on question was how to make timesheet submission quick enough to sustain, which is where the project and job template design did its work.
Two measures with no basis for precedence: Attendance and timesheet answer different questions, and a disagreement between them has no principled resolution.
Allocation needed at source: Project time assembled after the fact is a different quality of data from project time captured as work happens.
Timesheet submission as the adoption question: Timesheet adoption is determined by how quickly a submission can be completed, not by how often it is requested.
Differentiated treatment without a second system: Where individuals or roles need different handling, that needed expressing within timesheet policy rather than through a parallel attendance rule.
A commercial incentive pointing the other way: Attendance is well defined and straightforward to configure. Proposing it would have been easy and would have weakened the design.
Scope boundary on annual functions: Leave encashment was a genuine requirement needed once a year, which made it a poor fit for the go-live phase.
Interloop followed a structured, eight-step implementation in a single phase — discovery, a measurement model decision, policy blueprint, core configuration, timesheet architecture, template design driven by the client's own vocabulary, migration and go-live with hypercare. The consulting contribution here was as much about what was excluded as what was built. Attendance was not proposed, and the reasoning for leaving it out was documented alongside the rest of the design.
Implementation Approach
This engagement reinforced a question Interloop puts to project-based clients: which number appears on a client invoice or a project cost report? That measure is worth building properly, and the second one is worth declining — including where declining it means a smaller engagement.
Build the measure that appears on the invoice.
| Aspect | Before | After (Interloop) |
|---|---|---|
| Time measurement | Two possible measures, neither authoritative | One measure, with no second account to reconcile |
| Project allocation | Assembled after the period | Captured at source as work happens |
| Timesheet completion | A recall exercise | Selection from templates in the organisation's own vocabulary |
| Differentiated treatment | Would have needed a second rule set | Expressed within employee-specific timesheet policy |
| Allocation data | Pursued by project managers | Arrives as part of the process |
| Leave encashment | In scope for go-live | Scoped separately as an annual function |
Two possible measures, neither authoritative
One measure, with no second account to reconcile
Assembled after the period
Captured at source as work happens
A recall exercise
Selection from templates in the organisation's own vocabulary
Would have needed a second rule set
Expressed within employee-specific timesheet policy
Pursued by project managers
Arrives as part of the process
In scope for go-live
Scoped separately as an annual function
Before vs. After
Esse captures project-level time allocation as work happens, with submission sustained by templates that match how the organisation already describes its work, and no second system offering a competing account of the same week. For Interloop, the engagement demonstrated that scope discipline is a consulting output in its own right. The module that is straightforward to configure and easy to justify is not always the module that should be built.
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