Anatomy of a Timesheet
Continuing with the timesheet requirements theme, now it’s time to figure out how precise your consultants and subcontractors need to be when entering time into their timesheets. And what about other descriptive data such as location, overtime, billable, etc? Timesheets are a pretty unique entity as everyone has an opinion and they track what everyone is doing so they serve as the base of all your reporting and decision making against your plan.
Let’s tackle granularity first. It’s pretty common I find in consulting organizations to record time to the 15 minute interval (.25 hr) since people think in these terms (meeting reminders default to 15 minutes, for example). Second most common is the 30 minute timeframe – depending on your day this could be the length of a comedy or drama series on TV! And then there are the open entries that accommodate any timeframe (usually rounding to 6 minutes) such as 1.1 or 1.34 which is 1 hour and 6 minutes and one hour and 20.4 minutes, respectively. In this open entry approach, rounding becomes a discussion topic – nearest 6 minutes, nearest 15 minutes, etc. Getting down to the microsecond precision on timesheets is really only necessary if you are using a card scanning device that feeds into your timesheets. And even then, rounding is something that should be consistent and known – nearest 6 minutes or nearest 15 minutes is usually pretty safe. Of course, if you are reading this in the UK, your most common data entry is in days based on how consulting contracts are quoted to customers. A days vs. hrs entry conflict is usually discussed in a global system. Hours will usually win which makes the rounding discussion very important since a ½ day in a 7.5 hr UK day is 3.75 – things start to get a bit tricky!
Now let’s talk about supporting information capture on a timesheet. If you are in the US, I run into the requirement quite often of identifying where the resource was (state or country level) when performing the work. This ties directly to revenue recognition and allows your tax controller to report accurately the income earned per state. Adding location to the timesheet is one way of handling this tax requirements. Other requirements I see often are
- What title or job position did you fulfill on this contract? Project Manager? Solution Architect? A person may wear many hats in your organization and you need to make sure they are reflected as the right resource level for billing and budget usage with the client.
- What category is the work? Billable, non-billable, internal, etc. are pretty common elements here. What you need to discuss here is the empowerment of consultants to identify billable work vs. project managers that may setup a project with billable/non-billable tasks and just have consultants record time without identifying this category. The main question to answer here is ‘who has control over billable time’?
- Was the work performed on-site or off-site/remote? This tends to be a higher level of location or work in conjunction with location to determine where work is performed and what ratio of remote to onsite work your team is delivering.
Having consultants enter status or notes describing the work completed is a helpful requirement, provided data entry is quick and easy. Here you really need to give your team guidance, however, because it should be clear when data could appear on an invoice and when it’s kept strictly internal. If you’re reviewing hundreds of timesheets, it’s quite easy to miss an inappropriate comment that may end up on an invoice – Yikes!
So you were probably nodding your head throughout all of this going – yep, I need this and yep, I need that. Keep in mind the more you bedazzle your timesheet for data capture, the less accurate you may get time recorded due to the effort involved. Too often I hear ‘that would be nice’ when it’s not a critical requirement. Be clear on what is required and why it is required and leave the bedazzle part to your jeans & jackets – I’m just sayin’.
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