Does it matter if I enter a timesheet?
In this ongoing blog series about timesheet practices, we look at who is responsible for entering timesheets in your organization. One primary reason for timesheet entry is to capture client work for invoicing, revenue, and profitability analysis. This generally falls to the employee, consultant team, or even subcontractor as an activity. Makes sense….so what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that a timesheet can be intended for use in other departments such as HR for vacation balances and benefit allowance tracking. It can also mean how other departments are leveraging your Professional Services resources, which may drive internal cross charges. And last, it can mean the difference between accurate metrics in areas such as cost of sale, travel time, customer satisfaction efforts, and professional development tracking.
Let’s take the last example first, metrics gathering. Resources that are not performing billable work may view their need for timesheet entry as moot simply due to the fact that they are not performing billable work. Consider the metrics you are reporting on within your organization (or want to report on)
1) What is the average travel time of your sales support staff? Directors and Managers? This provides a base of reference for job postings so potential hires can have a clear understanding of what type of travel is expected.
2) What percentage of time is spent on sales support vs. customer satisfaction efforts? If your sales support team or management is spending a larger majority of time on customer satisfaction than sales, perhaps sales expectations are not being set correctly.
3) How much time are you and your staff investing in knowledge improvement and keeping current with industry trends? Part of the budgeting process usually identifies an investment in professional development so track that on timesheets to ensure resources are taking advantage of this investment and your team is one step ahead of the competition!
Inter-department cross charging is another big driver to having non-billable resources record timesheets. You have a payroll budget for your team to meet certain objectives. If another team is borrowing your resources, you may not be able to reach your objectives due to lack of staff but you are still carrying all the cost. I’ve seen most cross charges between Services and Sales but you may see Support resources borrowed for Services efforts, Presales resources borrowed for Development support, and so forth. If your organization has multiple locations or geographies, you may also run into the need to record efforts per office or locality.
And finally there is the HR benefit time tracking requirements. To me this is the biggest reason for many, if not all, of your employees to record time. If you have vacation allotments, sick time allotments, and other time off options based on events such as jury duty, parental leave, and funeral time, then you have a need to track a balance and hours taken against those balances. It makes sense to enter timesheets to track these items and some companies will have this be done on an exception basis (i.e. only enter timesheets if you take vacation, sick time, etc.). The problem with exception basis is that the person required to enter time must remember to enter the timesheet. Exceptions are, by definition, not regular which may impede the accuracy of capturing this information. Who’s going to remind you to enter a timesheet after you get back from vacation if you don’t usually enter a timesheet? Maybe your manager but what if you don’t have a manager? HR probably doesn’t even know you went on vacation! I’m just sayin’.
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