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Interview: Timesheet Pay Periods

A pay period is a regular length of time over which employee time is recorded and paid. Examples of pay periods are: weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly and sometimes yearly.

Setting up your timesheet to reflect pay periods instead of weeks has some benefits.  First off, you’ll see the number of scheduled hours in each pay period.  You can compare that with the number of hours you’ve entered.  Employees quickly know what’s expected of them.  Next, if you are required to submit timesheet for review, you’ll be submitting the entire pay period rather than just a week.  This saves time for both employees and managers.

Manager also approve a full pay period when reviewing, and usually lock timesheets so they cannot be edited after review.

Pay periods also show up on reporting windows so you can run report for a known date range that corresponds to your payroll cycle.  Same is true of exporting to payroll apps.  Using a predefined payroll period date range reduces the possibility of error.

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Interview: Timesheet Approvals

Submitting and approving timesheet is optional in Standard Time®.  After all, not every organization cares to impose management control over employee time.  But sometimes it’s just necessary to make sure things are done right.

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That’s why you can approve employee hours.

The most common timesheet mistakes can be headed off with email notifications.  Employees get one if their timesheet contains too few hours.  Or, they could get one if they haven’t submitted their timesheets.  Those two email notifications remind users to double-check their work before managers ever see it.

Managers see a list of users that have submitted their timesheet, and those who haven’t.  They see the number hours for the week, or pay period.  Just click once to approve.  Or, click once to approve and lock all at once.  Pretty easy.

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Interview: Customer Login and App

Clients want project status — all the time!  they want to know who is working on it… what is being done… how much it is costing them… and when it will be done.  Drilling into that, clients want to know the status of every task, which ones are finished or near completion, and which ones are upcoming.

That is the purpose of the ‘client login’ feature in your timesheet.  Clients have a special login they can use to check progress without bugging you.  They will see every project you’re doing for them, and all the hours logged.  They can also see expenses.  This becomes their own little project portal.

Download the ProjectBot app from the Google Play Store to do the same thing.

ProjectBot runs on Android.  It’s the same thing as the client project portal mentioned above, but runs on smartphones.  Just another convenience for checking project status.

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Interview: DCAA Compliance

If you’re a government contractor, don’t worry about Defense Contract Audit Agency compliance.  Standard Time® has you covered.  ST follows all the rules of DCAA. With just a few clicks your timesheet can be set up to become DCAA compliant.

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Here are just some things you should consider:

  1. Employees must have their own login id
  2. Employees can only enter time for themselves, not for other employees
  3. Time should only be entered on the day it occurred, not past or future
  4. Notes are required for any changes to past entries
  5. Timesheets must be submitted and approved by a manager

Here are some additional links that may help:

http://www.stdtime.com/dcaa.htm

http://www.stdtime.com/avoid-dcaa-audit.htm

http://www.stdtime.com/howto/setup-dcaa-timesheet.htm

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Interview: Better than a Spreadsheet

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.

  1. You can easily make the mistake of entering hours into the wrong employee.
  2. Same with the wrong project
  3. Same with the wrong client
  4. You can’t sync with a neato time tracking app like Standard Time®.
  5. You can’t easily share the spreadsheet on the web without collisions.
  6. You don’t get any email notifications when things are wrong.
  7. You don’t get any real project status.

So… that free timesheet may be costing you more than you think.

Check this out.

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Interview: Quickbooks Timesheets

Standard Time, the best timesheet on the planet and QuickBooks, the best accounts receivable app can now be joined!

You can send your time and expenses directly to QuickBooks with a special link.  Or, you can still export to IIF files that can be imported to QB.

The time you send to QB will be placed into the employee timesheet, where it can be used for payrol or client billing.

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Interview: Five Timesheet Features

Project tasks, graphical timesheet, track expenses, client invoicing and time off accruals. Five favorite features available in Standard Time®.

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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!

Take a look here.

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Interview: Task Warnings to Keep Projects on Budget

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.

Watch the video and let us know what you think!

 

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Interview: Quick Tasks

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.

  1. Start and stop time
  2. Actual duration, in hours
  3. Client and project
  4. Project task that was clicked
  5. Category to describe the type of work performed
  6. 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.  🙂

 

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Better Than a Spreadsheet

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.

Click here to download Standard Time.