If you’re a manufacturer using Standard Time® for your time tracking needs, it is significant to your business. You can affix barcodes to the products that will be manufactured and be able to follow it in every aspect of production. Know how long the assembly took to produce and also know which employee was working on it.
Scroll down for video.
Scan a barcode on each item during manufacturing, and you will get the following information:
Standard Time® allows a project manager to keep track of how much money the company is making on a project. Each time an engineer enters his time it will accumulate and have an earned value for that project.
Scroll down for the video. Plus, here’s another page that describes earned value using ‘actual work’ and ‘percent complete’. After going to this page, scroll down below it for a detailed description.
MS Project schedules without ‘Actual Work’ from employees are dead. They are little more than a list of tasks, and soon become out of date because employees complete some or portions of them, and the schedule doesn’t reflect that input.
You need a timesheet to supply those employee hours.
Take a look at this video. It describes the issue and suggest a possible solution.
A spreadsheet looks really inviting; free! If you have a small business with a few employees and don’t have to send any invoices, then it probably is OK. But multiple projects, many employees and different billing rates for them all is when you need a professional timesheet.
All true…
But here are some reasons spreadsheet are not the best tool for tracking client hours.
You can easily make the mistake of entering hours into the wrong employee.
Same with the wrong project
Same with the wrong client
You can’t sync with a neato time tracking app like Standard Time®.
You can’t easily share the spreadsheet on the web without collisions.
You don’t get any email notifications when things are wrong.
You don’t get any real project status.
So… that free timesheet may be costing you more than you think.
Project tasks, graphical timesheet, track expenses, client invoicing and time off accruals. Five favorite features available in Standard Time®.
Scroll down for the video.
This product is more than a timesheet. It is more than a project management app. In fact, there is enough here to run a good portion of your business. That is, if your business is engineering, manufacturing, or consulting.
Start by jumping into project tasks. Build projects that represent your client jobs. The tasks will show up in employee timesheet. Track hours to them with the graphical timesheet, or spreadsheet-style interface. Track expenses to those same projects. Add your mileage and vehicles. When you’re done, invoice your clients, all within the same software.
Did I forget project proposals? Or project revenue estimates? Or resource allocation? Yep, sure did… but that’s for another day. 🙂
Actually, it doesn’t end there. Employees can enter time off and PTO requests. When their vacation or personal or sick time is approved, those hours are subtracted from their bank. But… wait a few weeks, and those hours are automatically replenished by the time off accural mechanism. Now you’re ready for some more time off!
Here’s a project management tip to help keep projects on schedule and on budget. (scroll down to watch the video)
It’s called ‘Tasks Warnings’ and it works like this….
When employees near the end of certain tasks, a message appears telling them to finish up. If they continue until the task is over-complete, another message will appear, and they will no longer be able to add time to the task.
This strategy nudges employees to completion, and prevents huge overruns of time and money.
Employees are encouraged (by the software) to finish early, move on to the next task, and keep the project going.
Quick Tasks are great way to collect ‘Actual Work’ hours from employees. Users simply click a checkbox to start a timer, and click again to stop. Hours between those two clicks are automatically entered into the timesheet. (scroll down for video)
No manual time entry is required. Just click… click… click throughout the day. All task hours are collected up in the timesheet.
Every time log created by this process has the following fields available for reporting.
Start and stop time
Actual duration, in hours
Client and project
Project task that was clicked
Category to describe the type of work performed
Any custom fields, copied from the project task
As you can see, you are collecting a lot of information for each click. There is enough information to invoice clients, pay employees, expense or capitalize projects, or just see where your employee time is being spent. All that is collected with two lowly clicks. 🙂
Are you using a spreadsheet to track time, bill clients or using multiple billing rates? Spreadsheets aren’t cost effective in this case. Consider using Standard Time® instead. (scroll down for the video)
Here’s the problem. If want to track client billable hours in a spreadsheet, you’ll need rows or columns for clients, projects, employees, billing rates for each client, days, and hours. That’s a busy spreadsheet. In addition, you’ll need formulas and summations to arrive at client billing amounts.
Somebody has to program all that!
And somebody has to maintain the spreadsheet when new clients, projects, employees, and rates change. Remembering where everything is can be hard enough. But what if the person who developed the spreadsheet leaves the company? Things get pretty hard.
There are other issues using a spreadsheet for time tracking.
Employees can’t sync their time with a smartphone time tracking app like Standard Time. You can’t really share the spreadsheet on the web without locking it for the current user. The spreadsheet doesn’t check to see if you entered your time into the correct user or project. And, you could even enter time into the wrong time slot.
A professional time tracking app fixes all that. You might find that your ‘free’ timesheet is costing you more that you realized.