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Five Timesheet Features

More than a timesheet! 5 features to make time keeping even easier.  (scroll down for video)

  1. Project task list
  2. Time log list
  3. Expense and mileage tracking
  4. Customizable invoice templates
  5. Request PTO and other time off

Project task list.  This timesheet has a full project hierarchy.  That means you have projects, subprojects, and tasks.  Each task has estimates, actual work, percent complete, and a Gantt bar.

Time log list.  Actually, the time log contains the same information as the timesheet.  It’s just organized differently for ease of use.

Expense and mileage tracking.  You can enter expenses on a one-off basis, plus enter quantities of expenses or miles using a template.

Customizable invoice templates.  Create your own client invoice templates with your own logo and company style.

Request PTO and other time off.  Employees can submit time off requests, plus the system will accrue hours for vacation and other time off

What do you think?  Is that more than a timesheet?  🙂

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Employee Availability

Project managers can know when employees are available for upcoming projects. With the Standard Time® project management app a graph shows when an employee is available to work, is overloaded with work and is scheduled to work.

Scroll down to view the video.

The employee availability graph uses both projects and project tasks to determine when employees are available for work.

The simplest method takes employee assignments from projects and plots them on the graph.  For example: if a person is assigned 25% of their day to a project, you’ll see small bars.  If they are assigned to four such projects, the graph will fill up completely.

A more complex example is assigning project tasks.  All the task assignments are totaled up for each time period and graphed.  You can easily see when a person is overloaded or under-allocated.

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Interview: Project Revenue

Look into the crystal ball – you can tell the future revenue with Standard Time®.

Well, sort of…

You can predict future project revenue  (scroll down for the video) with a nice little project sales funnel.  Here’s how it works:

1. You enter the estimated sales revenue for each project
2. You enter the likeliness of winning the project
3. You set the dates you expect to see the revenue
4. Open the Project Revenue chart and see all the projects added together

Projects with a high likeliness of winning influence the chart more than those with low percentages.

Download and give it a try.

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Interview: Timesheet Tasks

The following interview with Ray White of Scoutwest, Inc. will explain who can see your timesheet and also explain favorites. While entering time for a project you don’t have to wade through a long list, just choose your favorites and only see those.

Mr. White also describes who can view your timesheet and who cannot.  Normally, your timesheet is private.  No other employees can see it.  But your boss can.  Executives and project managers may also be able to see your timesheet, depending upon their access rights.

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Task Percentage Warnings

Companies can limit employee’s “task lingering” on projects. This video shows you how to do that in the Standard Time® timesheet.

Employees sometimes camp out on familiar tasks, and don’t move on.  Maybe they are unfamiliar with upcoming tasks, or maybe they just don’t want to move on for some reason.  In any case, it can cost you money when employees don’t finish up and move on to new tasks.

There’s a nice feature that prevents this.  (Scroll down to see the video)

You can no set a percent level that warns employees when they are getting close to finishing a task.  There is another percentage level that prevents all new time input.  The first one let’s them know it’s time to finish up.  The second one locks them out entirely.  Implementing a task plan like this helps improve project efficiency.

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Project Rollups and Task Totals

Project rollups: Totals that represent all the tasks under a project or subproject.

Each column in the Project Task view may be totaled up on the project row.  Examples include Duration, Actual Work, Percent complete, and even the Gantt column.  The video below shows how this work.

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How To Integrate MS Project with Timesheet

Follow these steps to integrate Microsoft Project with Standard Time®.  (scroll down for the video)

  1. Start by choosing File, Projects.
  2. Right-click on a project and choose Microsoft Project Integration Wizard
  3. Navigate to your MPP file
  4. Finish the Wizard

MS Project will open the MPP file and pull down your tasks into Standard Time®.  You won’t see them in the timesheet right away.  There is one step you must take first.

Click the Project Tasks tab to see the new tasks from the MPP file.  At the far right, you will see a columns labeled Timesheet.  Check the boxes for each task you wish to see in the timesheet.  Any task without this checked will not show up in the timesheet.

Now that you have integrated the timesheet with MSP, you can send your ‘Actual’ hours back.

Choose View, Refresh Project Tasks.  That will open a dialog that lets you send your timesheet hours to MSP.

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Project Revenue Win-Loss Graph

When bidding for projects, you win some and you lose some.  It’s like any sales process.  Each project has it’s own percentage of win/loss.

Of course, that can be frustrating.  You perform a bunch of research, develop a preliminary project plan, and then develop a project propsal, only to learn that somebody else go tthe job.  Or worse, the propective client goes dark and you never hear from them again.  They don’t come back and thank you for all your hard work in developing the plan and proposal.  Instead, they just ignore you.  They’ve obviously moved on, but don’t have the couirtesy to tell you.

That’s life.  🙁

But at least you have a nice project funnel to predict possible future revenue.  And it works from that percentage of win/loss you enter into each project.  Consider the following scenario:

Project A: Win percentage: 90%, $45,000
Project B: Win percentage: 75%, $80,000
A sales funnel says you about 82% chance of winning a deal, and the expected revenue is about $100K.

Of course two projects is not really enough.  You should put a lot more projects into the funnel for the estimation to be accurate.  The more projects in the hopper, the more likely the averages are to be real.

Check out this video too:
https://www.stdtime.com/videos/revenueforecast.htm

 

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Employee Availability Chart

Do you have an engineer available for a project?  How do you know?  What tasks are they working on?  Are they over-worked?  Or under?

There are answers to all these questions.  Scroll down and watch this video for some ideas.

Get a bar chart of upcoming work an engineer is assigned to.  How is the chart built?  It comes from projects the employee is assigned to, and specific tasks.

Here are a few other videos to learn more:

http://www.stdtime.com/videos/resourceallocation.htm

http://www.stdtime.com/videos/employeeavailability.htm

 

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Clients and Project Relationships

If you’re like most companies, you perform multiple projects for each client.  You may perform them serially, or several at once.  Each one may have different billing rates.  They may have different tasks.  Different starting and due dates.  Watch the video below to see the relationship between projects and clients.  This is a good way to manage projects.