TimeRewards provides nonprofit organizations a granular record of how staff and volunteer time is allocated across grants, programs, and administrative work, the detail Form 990 and Single Audit requirements under the Uniform Guidance (formerly OMB Circular A-133) demand. Time is recorded as it happens, not reconstructed at period end, giving labor allocation and funder reporting a foundation that holds up.
Staff, contractor and volunteer time, grant budgets and overhead usually live in three places. In TimeRewards they are one record: the hours you track are the same data your budgets burn against and your overhead allocates from.
Log hours by donor, grant, project, or task, anywhere, anytime.
Staff, contractor and volunteer effort, one record by grant.
A period timesheet. At first staff, contractor and volunteer hours live in three separate files with no grant coding; with TimeRewards the same 78 hours sit on one sheet, each row coded to its award.
Enter time by percentage, and the timesheet fills itself in.
For nonprofits splitting one week across several awards, the split is set once.
One staff member’s week. Without percentage entry every cell is typed again each week and no allocation is recorded against the awards; with TimeRewards a saved split of 50 percent Youth Services, 30 percent Food Access and 20 percent administration fills the same 40 hours, with holidays and time off already deducted.
Plan and monitor spending against each award’s allocation.
Variances surface while there is still time to adjust.
A budget versus actuals bar for the Youth Services award. Without period-level visibility the spend is discovered at 104 percent of the allocation, already over; with TimeRewards the burn shows 78 percent recorded in period 8 of 12, while there is still time to adjust.
Track and report overhead and time off allocation by project.
Overhead and time off, allocated like everything else.
An overhead report. At first overhead and time off are one 120 hour number with nothing behind it; with TimeRewards the same 120 hours are allocated across Youth Services, Food Access and the Community Fund.
Still one record, however the funder asks for it.
Also known as effort certification or labor allocation
Time and effort reporting documents how an employee’s time was allocated across funded activities and supports the salary costs charged to a grant.
Federal awards are the most prescriptive example, but the same principle applies broadly to restricted funding: labor allocations should reflect the work actually performed, supported by contemporaneous records rather than retrospective estimates.
Three Things It Is Not
What a grant was originally budgeted to receive and what an employee actually spent on it are not the same figure. The allocation that matters is the one the underlying record can support.
Reconstructing an entire reporting period after the work is done introduces avoidable uncertainty. Recording time as it occurs gives the final allocation a stronger basis.
Allocation gets more complex once an employee supports multiple functions. A finance manager might split time across several awards and general administration. The record needs to capture every piece of that.
Reporting requirements move: the 2026 nonprofit compliance changes worth watching.
Trusted by teams since 2004 across nonprofits, community organizations and grant-funded programs
Each challenge has a corresponding settings-level solution in TimeRewards. The controls below use the product’s actual feature names.
A program lead may work across several grants, an unrestricted program, and administrative activities within the same reporting period. If the timesheet cannot capture those distinctions, allocations may need to be estimated retrospectively.
Flexible Timesheets / Unlimited Projects and TasksVolunteer hours can represent a significant share of a program’s effort, yet they’re often tracked apart from employee time. Keeping those records in disconnected spreadsheets makes consistent reporting harder.
Flexible TimesheetsA grant can approach or exceed its restricted allocation well before the variance shows up in a formal finance review. Forecasting spend against the allocation as time is recorded gives program and finance teams earlier visibility: time to act while the allocation can still be adjusted, not just explained after the fact.
Budget vs. Actuals Reporting (Professional and above)Quarterly or annual allocation exercises rely on information reconstructed after the work occurred. Recording time throughout the reporting period creates a stronger underlying record for the resulting allocation.
Automated Email RemindersDifferent funders often need different views of the same underlying time. When those reports are assembled by hand from spreadsheets, the same information gets reorganized and re-validated every time.
Exportable ReportsReview and approval are an important record of oversight, but sign-off buried in email threads is hard to retrieve and harder to tie back to the reporting period it covers.
Multi-Level Approval Workflow (Professional and above)When staff time and program expenses are maintained separately, finance and program teams may lack a consolidated view of the resources required to deliver an activity or program.
Expense Tracking (Professional and above)Each time entry can capture the grant, program, and activity associated with the work at the time it is recorded. Thus, allowing labor allocation from a retrospective exercise into the underlying time record, creating a consistent source for reporting and financial analysis.
Budget-versus-actuals reporting brings approved hours and coded expenses into one view, showing spend against a restricted allocation. For a nonprofit, staying within that allocation isn’t just bookkeeping: it protects funder trust and future funding eligibility, and gives program and finance leaders room to make deliberate tradeoffs instead of reactive cuts. Catching variances while there’s still time to adjust staffing or spending is what makes that possible.
Working out what a funded position really costs? Try the FTE calculator, or the advanced employee cost calculator.
Personnel costs are usually the largest expense in any grant-funded budget, which is why labor allocation draws the closest scrutiny in a funder review. A reviewer isn’t spot-checking a number: they’re accountable to their own agency or board for how award dollars were spent. So when they pull a reporting period and ask how a salary charge maps to the work performed, the real question isn’t whether the work happened. It’s whether the organization can produce a record showing the allocation reflects actual effort, not the original budget, and not a number reconstructed to match it after the fact.
Reviewers don’t stop at the number: they look at how the record behind it was built. Entries logged well after the reporting period, allocations that mirror the budget percentages, or corrections with no explanation are the classic signals of a record reconstructed after the fact. Any one of those can turn a routine review into a deeper one.
TimeRewards keeps that record organized and retrievable. Filter by employee and reporting period to pull entries, grant coding, approval status, and correction history, and export what a reviewer asks for, with a timeline showing the allocation was recorded as the work happened, not assembled to answer the question.
Approved and allocated time provides information used by payroll, accounting, and reporting workflows. TimeRewards integrations transfer that information without requiring manual re-entry.
Every integration, with what moves and which plans include it.
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