Time sheets

One company I worked for tried this, and they wanted it broken down into 15-minute increments, linked back to a client billing code. There was an "internal work" code but the system would flag your timesheet if more than 10% was billed to the "internal work" code, and management would follow up to see why it was so high. As a devops guy, a lot of my work crossed across multiple clients (e.g. we had Puppet code that was reused across all clients, so if I was working on that it was hard to attribute its value to any individual client), was purely internal (build system, chatops bot, etc), or was super-short duration (like 1-3 minutes). I was told that I MUST itemize every single item I worked on, no matter what the source. Ticket? On the timesheet. Request in Slack (which was an officially-sanctioned channel)? On the timesheet. I was also told that work that benefited all clients should be billed out to all clients in some proportion that I thought reasonable. OK, cool. I think my first timesheet worked out to like 70 hours. Doing 3-4 things in a 15-minute period meant that I submitted 1 hour of timesheet time (4 line items at a minimum of 15 minutes each) for 15 minutes of actual work. Doing 30 minutes of work on Puppet code but having to "fairly" bill all of the clients could balloon it to several hours of timesheet time. And let's not forget that it took me (legitimately) several hours to collect all the information to actually do the timesheet, having to go back through tickets and Slack and remembering in-person conversations. Management freaked out and said I was doing it wrong. I asked them to explain which line items were incorrect and I would happily make the necessary changes; of course, they couldn't find any. I was told that I can't have a timesheet line for doing my timesheet, and I replied that if it's work requested by my employer for my employer's benefit, then it needs to be accounted for -- I'm not doing it for free. This went on for a while, then I requested to take a month of vacation. My boss was SUPER confused because I usually used all my vacation in the fall for a hunting trip and this was the middle of summer, until I pointed out that I had filed 70+ hour weeks for the last 2 months, and my standard work week is 40 hours, so I had 160+ hours of accrued overtime. "But you didn't actually work those hours!" "My timesheet, filled out according to official company policies, says I did." "butbutbutbutbutbut you can't just leave for a month!" "That's a sad story; here are the relevant labour laws that say I can." I didn't get the time off, but I was no longer required to fill in timesheets, which was the desired outcome anyways.