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Quick Questions: Expense Templates

Expense templates simplify  entry for recurring expenses or mileage.

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Let’s say you incur the same expenses on a regular basis. The happen weekly or monthly. Here are some examples:

  1. Mileage, driving to and from a client office
  2. Items you resell to clients on a regular basis
  3. Shipping and receiving the same items and weight

There’s a simple way to enter these items instead of completing all the fields or all the expenses. Just create an expense template with all the fields pre-populated, and then enter a quantity into the timesheet.

For the examples above:

  1. Enter the number of miles to the client office
  2. Enter a quantity of items you resold to clients
  3. Enter a quantity of items you packaged and shipped

 

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Quick Questions: Time Off Requests

Every employee, business owner, independent contractor, consultant or small business owner takes time off from their job. The following video will show how Standard Time® handles vacation requests.

New hours are accrued periodically, and hours are subtracted from that bank as time off requests are approved. Manager receive an email notification when time off is requested. And employees get another email when the request is approved or rejected.

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Question: Why Do Projects Cost More Than Expected?

There are a lot of possible reasons for this.  I’ll enumerate the reasons why I think projects cost more than expected, and then discuss the most probable ones.  Let me know what you think!  Got a few more reasons?

  1. Forgotten tasks
  2. Unknown tasks
  3. Customer expectations change
  4. Feature creep

My biggest issue is always ‘forgotten tasks’.  In my experience, forgotten tasks results in project cost overruns more often than any other reason.  People tend to throw out a cost before they have listed all the work involved.  Halfway down the road, they remember 25 – 50% more tasks.  That adds up!

Sometimes, one thing leads to another.  Tasks that you didn’t know about pop up.  What are you going to do when that happens?  You can’t just abandon the project.  You have to eat the extra work and absorb the cost overrun.

Once your customer gets a look at the product, he may have a few new ideas of his own.  He may see something he likes, and feel free suggest some additions.  Those add up too.  Just make sure he knows that he must absorb the additional project costs.  Otherwise, you’ll end up eating that too.

Feature creep happens when customers and developers like what they see and want a little more, and little more, and a little more.  Before you know it, there’s an extra 10% cost in the project.  Yikes!

–ray