The situation
A civil contractor based in Armidale was running 30 field staff across three crews on multiple active sites. Every Friday afternoon, paper timesheets would come in from the field, sometimes dropped at the office, sometimes photographed and texted, occasionally arriving on Monday morning. The office manager would spend most of Friday afternoon and a chunk of Monday compiling the previous week's hours by job code, cross-referencing against crew rosters, and catching the timesheets that had not arrived at all. Six hours of administrative work, every single week, before payroll could even begin.
Errors were common. Handwriting was sometimes illegible. Job codes were occasionally transposed. When a crew member forgot to submit entirely, the gap was not always caught until the payroll run was already underway.
The flow we built
Each crew member now submits their timesheet at the end of each shift through Microsoft Forms on their phone. The form captures name, site, job code, hours worked, and any notes. Power Automate immediately routes the submission to the appropriate supervisor for approval: crew allocation determines which supervisor receives the request.
Once a supervisor approves, the entry is written to a SharePoint list keyed by job code and week. Rejected entries trigger a notification back to the crew member with the supervisor's comments. The SharePoint list feeds a Power BI dashboard that refreshes hourly, showing hours by job code, any submissions still awaiting approval, and any crew members who have not yet submitted for the current day.
On Monday morning, a scheduled export pulls the previous week's approved entries from the SharePoint list and produces a Xero-ready payroll file, formatted to the firm's chart of accounts.
The platforms
Microsoft Forms, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Power BI are all part of the firm's existing Microsoft 365 Business subscription. No new tools were required. Xero handles payroll. The workflow runs on a Bot Care Professional tier, which means authentication issues with the SharePoint connection or changes to the Forms API are caught and resolved before they affect the Monday export.
The results
Weekly payroll preparation dropped from six hours to approximately 30 minutes. The 30 minutes is the time the office manager spends reviewing the Monday export for any anomalies before submitting to Xero. Field staff receive a same-day submission confirmation, which has reduced the number of "did you get my timesheet?" calls to near zero.
One outcome that was not anticipated: the Power BI dashboard gave the director, for the first time, a real-time view of hours by job code across all active sites. Within the first month, it surfaced a job that was running 40 percent over its estimated labour hours, early enough to have a conversation with the client before the cost became a dispute.
What this could look like for your civil or construction business
If payroll prep still involves paper, text messages, or a Friday afternoon of reconciliation, a Flow-based timesheet system can typically be built inside your existing Microsoft 365 licensing with no new platforms required. We have built similar setups for civil contractors, builders, and facilities maintenance operators across regional New South Wales.