A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Here are some simple steps to view your employee’s timesheets.
Managers need the ability to check employee time so they can verify that hours are correctly logged to projects and tasks. Of course, employees can’t look in on other people’s time, but administrators can if they have permissions to do so.
Simply follow these steps to check your employee timesheets.
Your timesheet can be closely tied to your payroll pay periods. One way is to configure it to show all the days of the current pay period instead of just one week.
video below
Most timesheets show only seven days. But sometimes employees wish to see the full pay period so they can make sure all the working days are filled in. Nobody wants a short paycheck just because their timesheet isn’t filled in. It’s nice to see a weekly view from Monday to Friday, but sometimes even more helpful to see the full pay period.
Here’s what you see:
If you’re in a consulting firm, you know that billable hours are your livelihood. Losing hours is not an option. Lose too many, and you’ll be consulting somewhere else. Every consultant must be utilized to the max, and every hour must be accounted for.
Time is money. scroll down for a video…
In that light, the management overhead of submitting and approving timesheets is a small price to pay for accurate billing. Think of it as another set of eyes on your most valuable asset — consultants, and their billable hours.
Managers can view a list of employees who have submitted their timesheets. Emails go out to those who have forgotten. Another email goes to managers, and lists employees who forgot. Now managers can check each timesheet and approve it.
What are they looking for? Correct time under clients, projects, tasks, and time periods.
I’m surprised at how few people know what task linking is. In fact, they may have never linked two tasks together. Sure… they track time to project tasks. They know the value of comparing estimates with actuals. And they see the value in completing tasks on a timely basis so they can be closed out and newer tasks started.
But they don’t link one task to another. (scroll down for video)
Linking tasks is actually pretty simple. And valuable. With a Gantt chart, you’ll instantly see that one task must end before another can start. In the video below, the example is building a house, where the roofing cannot start until there’s at least a foundation and some walls. That’s what task linking is all about.
Some tasks absolutely cannot start until other things are done first. That’s called a dependency. Set up those link dependencies, and you’ll get instant value from them.