The hours on it are the hours the practice booked.
The timesheet is raised from the confirmation rather than from what somebody remembers. It carries the date, the site, the start and finish times as confirmed, and any change that was agreed on the day and written back onto the confirmation at the time.
A practice signs it at the site or by return of e-mail, whichever it prefers. Both count, and the office keeps whichever it received against the booking thread so that a later query has something to be answered from.
Where the hours actually worked differ from the hours confirmed, the timesheet shows both lines and the reason sits beside them. A timesheet that quietly shows a different figure from the confirmation is a timesheet that will be queried, and rightly.
No invoice is raised until the signature is in. That is a rule and not a preference, because an invoice raised against an unsigned timesheet puts a practice in the position of checking arithmetic it never agreed to.
One covered shift, one line, one reference the ledger already knows.
Invoicing follows the signed timesheet and nothing else. The invoice shows one line for each covered shift, with the date and the hours, so a practice can read it against its own rota without opening a second document.
Where a practice runs its purchase ledger against a purchase order number, that number goes onto the confirmation at the start. Asking for it at the confirmation rather than at the invoice is a small piece of discipline that saves a fortnight at the other end.
Invoices go to the address the practice names for purchase correspondence, which is often not the address that keeps the rota. Both addresses are held on the booking, and neither is guessed at.
A query about an invoice is answered against the signed timesheet, and a query about a timesheet is answered against the confirmation. The chain is short on purpose, and every link in it is a document both sides already hold.
What was left open, and the name it was given to.
At the finish time, anything still open is written onto a handover note and given to the person the practice named on the confirmation. The note says what is outstanding and who now holds it, and it is handed over rather than left on a desk.
A copy reaches this office with the timesheet. It is kept with the booking thread, so a practice asking three weeks later what was passed on that afternoon gets an answer from a document rather than from somebody’s recollection.
The note is deliberately short. It is a list of open items and names, not an account of the shift, and it is written at the end of the day by the person who worked it rather than assembled afterwards by somebody who did not.
Where nothing was left open, the note says so in one line. A note that says nothing is outstanding is worth writing, because its absence is otherwise indistinguishable from a note that never got written.
Which squares were covered, by whom, on which dates.
The rota record is this office’s own account of which squares were covered, by whom and on which dates. It is assembled from the confirmations, which means it agrees with what both sides were sent at the time.
It is what a practice is shown when it asks what has been worked this quarter. The office can produce it by date, by site or by person, and it carries the same figures as the invoices, because both are built from the same documents.
It also carries the squares that were requested and never became covered, with the reason. That part is less comfortable reading and it is the part a practice manager planning next quarter actually wants, because it shows which weekdays this office struggled to fill.
Records are kept for the periods set out on page six, where what this office holds and what a practice holds is written out kind by kind.
A practice that is leaving can ask for its rota record to be sent across before the file is closed, and it goes out in the form the practice asks for rather than in the form that happens to be convenient here.