What to Do When an Employee Files a Wage Claim Against You

A former crew member says you owe him for hours he worked and never got paid. He does not need a lawyer, a filing fee, or much evidence to start this. You need…

By Toolberry TeamSeptember 22, 20268 min read

Updated September 22, 2026

A former crew member says you owe him for hours he worked and never got paid. He does not need a lawyer, a filing fee, or much evidence to start this. You need records, and the law says keeping them was your job.

Why wage claims are decided by your timesheets, and what those timesheets need to show. Published September 2026.

This is the lawsuit that actually happens to small service businesses. Not the dramatic one. A guy who quit four months ago tells the labor board he worked through lunch every day, or that the drive between jobs was never paid, or that his last two weeks went missing. Sometimes he is wrong. Sometimes he is right and you never noticed.

Either way, the thing that decides it is the same.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But there is one rule here that every owner should know before it matters.

The rule that catches people

Under federal law, keeping accurate records of hours worked is your duty as the employer, not the employee's. The Department of Labor spells out what you have to keep in Fact Sheet #21.

Here is the part that surprises owners. If your records are missing or sloppy, you do not simply win because the employee cannot prove his hours. The Supreme Court settled this in 1946, in a case called Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery. When the employer's records are inadequate, the employee only has to show his hours as a reasonable estimate. Then the burden moves to you to prove the exact hours he worked, or to show why his estimate is wrong.

Read that again, because it is the whole game. Bad records do not create a tie. They hand the estimate to the other side. A former employee's memory of working through lunch every day becomes the starting number, and you are the one who has to disprove it.

Good records are not about looking organized. They are the only thing standing between you and somebody else's arithmetic.

What a timesheet has to show

A single number of hours per day is not much of a record. These are the pieces that actually answer the claims people bring.

Hours the employee entered himself

The strongest timesheet is the one the crew member created on his own device, on the day, not the one you reconstructed on Friday from memory and a schedule.

In ToolBerry the timesheet belongs to the person who logged it and is tied to the job it was worked on. Location-based timesheets can clock the crew in and out based on where they are, so the start time is not somebody's recollection. When the employee's own entry says he clocked out at 4:15, the claim that he worked until 7 has to get past his own record first.

Breaks as their own entry, not a deduction

Missed meal and rest breaks are one of the most common wage claims, and the reason owners lose them is that the break never existed as a record. It was a half hour subtracted from a total at the end of the week.

ToolBerry tracks break start and break end as their own fields on the timesheet. So a break is a thing that happened at a time, entered by the person who took it, instead of a deduction you applied later. If a claim says he never got a lunch, there is a specific entry saying otherwise, from him.

Travel time kept separate from work time

Driving between jobs is a real source of unpaid wage claims, and it is easy to get wrong without meaning to, because it does not feel like work to the person paying for it.

ToolBerry records travel start and travel end separately from work start and work end, and calculates them as separate buckets along with break time. So you can see what was drive time and what was on site, per job, and pay it correctly in the first place. Preventing the claim is cheaper than winning it.

A submit and approve step

A timesheet that nobody ever agreed on is just your version of events.

ToolBerry timesheets move through a status. The crew member submits, and a supervisor approves or rejects with a note explaining why. That gives you something better than a record. It gives you a moment where both sides looked at the same hours and signed off, week after week, long before anybody was angry.

When a claim arrives eighteen months later, months of approved timesheets that the employee submitted himself are very hard to walk back.

The part that matters most: you cannot quietly change it

This is where most systems fall apart, and it is worth understanding properly.

The accusation in a wage case is almost never "there are no records." It is "the boss changed my hours." If your timesheets live in a spreadsheet, that accusation is very hard to answer, because a spreadsheet cell has no memory. Whatever it says today is all it has ever said.

ToolBerry handles this in two ways, and the difference between them is deliberate.

Deleting is locked for everyone. Once a timesheet is submitted or approved, it cannot be deleted. Not by a supervisor, not by an admin, not by the owner. There is no override. A submitted timesheet exists permanently.

Editing is possible, but it is never quiet. Payroll can still correct a submitted timesheet, because real corrections are necessary and pretending otherwise would just push people into fixing things outside the system. But on Pro every record carries an audit trail with the before and after value of each change and who made it. So a correction appears as a correction, with a date and a name on it.

That combination is the honest one. You can fix a genuine mistake. You cannot make the original disappear. When you hand your timesheets to an investigator, the edit history is evidence of good faith rather than a gap they get to fill with suspicion.

How long to keep all of it

The DOL asks you to keep payroll records for three years, and the records used to calculate wages, which includes time cards, for two years. Those are floors, not targets. Claims can reach back further than you expect depending on your state, and a record you still have costs you nothing while a record you threw out costs you the argument.

The practical advantage of timesheets living in a real system is that nobody has to remember to keep them. They do not leave with a phone, a laptop, or the supervisor who quit.

If the claim already arrived

Do not edit or clean up any existing timesheet. Not one. This is the single worst thing you can do, and the audit trail will show it.
Export everything for that employee. Every timesheet, every job he was assigned to, the approvals and any rejection notes.
Pull the same records for the crew members who worked alongside him on those days.
Write down your pay practices as they actually were, not as you meant them to be.
Send all of it to an employment attorney in your state before you respond to anyone.

Step one is worth repeating. An owner tidying up timesheets after a claim turns a wage dispute into a much worse problem.

What this does not solve

Good records answer how many hours somebody worked. They do not answer whether you classified that person correctly, whether your pay rates and overtime math are right for your state, or whether your policies say what you think they say. Those are worth an hour with an employment attorney, and that hour is cheaper than any of this going wrong.

What records do is keep a disagreement about hours from becoming a disagreement about your credibility.

Where to start

Employee timesheets are a ToolBerry Pro feature, because they need a shared workspace, real accounts and server-enforced permissions. The free app is one person's app on their own device, which is the right tool when you are still the only one on the truck.

The moment you hire your first crew member, that changes. Pro adds the shared workspace, roles and permissions, the submit and approve workflow, and the audit trail. It is priced per company rather than per technician, so hiring your fourth person does not raise your bill. No lock-in, no auto renewal, and you can export everything any time, which matters a lot when the thing you are storing is legal evidence.

This article is general information about record keeping, not legal advice, and employment law varies a lot by state. Talk to an employment attorney licensed where you operate.

Have a question?

If you are setting up timesheets for a crew for the first time and want a second opinion on how to structure it, email us at contact@toolberry.net.

Grab ToolBerry from the App Store or Google Play, or visit toolberry.net.