What a CIS bureau needs from a week of timesheets

What a usable week looks like, field by field

Every field below is there because its absence costs somebody an hour. None of them is a preference.

• The subcontractor, named the same way every week. Not "Dave", not "D Murphy" one week and "Murphy D" the next. The bureau holds the tax reference and the verification result already, and it holds them against a name. A name that moves breaks the match, and a broken match is a manual reconciliation.
• One row per day, not a weekly total. A total with no days behind it cannot be queried, cannot be split across a tax month boundary, and cannot be corrected without redoing the whole week. Days are the unit that survives a question.
• Start, finish and the break. Paid hours are worked out from those three, so send the three rather than the answer. Where the answer is sent instead, nobody can tell later whether the break was taken off.
• The site or job the day was against. Costing needs it, and so does the contractor when he asks which of his jobs a figure belongs to.
• The rate, or a plain statement that the bureau applies it. Either is workable. What is not workable is a file where some lines carry a rate and some do not.
• Who approved it, and when. A week with no name on it is a claim, not an approval. See below.
• The week ending date, written the same way every time. Pick a format and keep it. A file mixing 05/06 and 06/05 has already cost more than it saved.

The tax month runs from the 6th to the 5th, and weeks do not

CIS runs on tax months, not calendar months. GOV.UK puts it plainly on file your monthly returns: a return for the tax month of 6 May to 5 June has to reach HMRC by 19 June. Payroll weeks run Monday to Sunday, or Sunday to Saturday, and they do not care about the 5th.

So roughly once a month, a week straddles the boundary. This is the single most common reason a bureau has to go back to a client, and it is why one row per day matters more than any other field on the list. With days, the week splits at the 5th and both halves land in the right return. With a weekly total, somebody has to decide, and whoever decides is guessing.

A nil month still needs a return, or inactivity has to be requested. A late return is £100 the day after the 19th, and it goes up from there. Neither of those is the client’s idea of a small administrative point when they find out.

What "approved" has to mean

A figure a worker sent is a claim. A figure a manager read and put their name to is an approval. They are different things and a bureau should never be the first human to look at a number that is about to be paid.

What that means in practice is that the file you receive should carry only weeks somebody at the client has signed off, with the name and the date of that sign-off available if you ask. If a client’s process cannot tell you who approved a week, the answer to "who authorised this payment" is nobody, and that is a question that gets asked at exactly the wrong moment.

A correction after approval should be a new version rather than a quiet edit of the old one. If last week’s file and this week’s file disagree, you want to be able to see that they disagree, and why.

Hours are labour, and labour is only half of it

A timesheet gives you hours at a rate, which is a labour figure. The deduction is worked out on the labour, and materials the subcontractor actually paid for are taken out of the figure the deduction is applied to. A timesheet says nothing about materials, and it should not pretend to.

The deduction rate is the bureau’s to determine, not the timesheet’s. It follows from verification: 20% for a registered subcontractor, 30% where they are not registered or cannot be verified, and nothing at all where they hold gross payment status. No timesheet system can tell you which of those applies, because none of them is a fact about the week worked.

Two other things stay yours regardless of how good the week is: whether the work is a construction operation within the scheme at all, and whether the person is genuinely self-employed. A tidy timesheet makes neither of those questions go away.

The list to send back to a client

Written to be forwarded. Nothing in it needs a system to fix, and every one of them has cost somebody a Friday.

• A photographed paper sheet with a total and no days. Send the days.
• A name that changes spelling between weeks.
• A week ending date in two formats in the same file.
• Hours that already have the break taken off in some rows and not others.
• A week that crosses the 5th with no way to split it.
• A figure changed after it was sent, with no note saying it changed.
• Nobody’s name against the approval.
• The file arriving on Monday for a Friday payment.

Where SHINDI fits, and where it does not

SHINDI files nothing with HMRC. It does not verify a subcontractor, it does not work out a deduction, it does not produce the monthly return and it does not produce the payment and deduction statement. Those are the bureau’s, and they stay the bureau’s.

What it does is the collection. Workers clock in and out by WhatsApp message, the hours are worked out by code from what they sent, a manager approves the week, and approved weeks come out as a CSV by week and by job, with the days underneath every total. There is one CSV layout today and the per-package templates are not built, which is worth knowing before you ask for one.

The detail of what is in the file is on CIS and payroll hours, and what working with a practice looks like is on for accountants and CIS bureaux.

About this guide

This guide reads the HMRC scheme guide CIS 340, last updated 27 August 2026, together with the GOV.UK guidance on what you must do as a CIS contractor and its monthly returns page. It is written for bureaux and for the subcontractors who send them work, and it is not legal advice or tax advice. Rates, deadlines and penalties change; the date at the top is when this page was last read against the guidance.