Employee time tracking

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ptonsparky

ptonsparky

Tom
Location
NE (9.06 miles @5.9 Degrees from Winged Horses)
Occupation
EC - retired
Bookkkeeper is about ready to shoot my employees. Their weekly time sheets, for paychecks, do not always match up with the hours they put on the job tickets we use for billing and job costing. How have you handled this pia problem? Other than starting all over with new help.
 
I have never understood why any business would want to have a double set of time records in the first place. Pay them off the job tickets.

if there is indirect time such as vacation or sick time, have them submit a job ticket for that.
 
Fueling the van, donuts in the morning, time at supply house,lunch. All of

these activites cost you time & money. Can you use some type of GPS

tracking ? Or just ask the guys to pay more attention to job tickets ?
 
The way our shop does it is everyone comes in the morning to the meeting room and sits at a table and fills out their workorders and time cards(which show total hours, work order(s) name and number, and obviously name and date) from the day before. About an hour later our office guy grabs all of it and verifies the time cards match the hours on the work orders. If it doesn't, you get a phone call.

Honestly, there's often mistakes with one thing or another so the office guy just fixes it. But if he can't figure out what you were trying to do, then you get the phone call.

Sometimes we'll work on something for the company in the shop or work up bids(we give free estimates) for things like that that don't have a work order(unbillable time), so we'll just write down "shop."
 
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If I work for you from 7:00-3:30, then what ever I do during that time is work related. I get a 1/2 hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks during the day, some days I take them and some days I don't. Your job hours and your man hours can't possibly match, unless when they stop and get gas you are charging that time to a job. What if they stop at the wholesale house and get material for three jobs? How do you break that down?

When my old boss started to get the same idea in his head, I told him to just pay me a salary and I'll sign a contract for 48 hours a week (that's what we worked) and anything else would have to be agreed upon. The upside was that he was a working boss so he was usually on the job with me, so I didn't really have to account for my time.

We fill out an end of day sheet here and the name we gave it was "create a day". Unless you're having me followed, you pretty much have to take my word for what I did that day.
 
Cow said:
The way our shop does it is everyone comes in the morning to the meeting room and sits at a table and fills out their workorders...
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The shop I work for is pretty much the same as Cow's. The only exception being that all timesheets and service tickets must be completed on the day the work is done. You've heard the saying, "Well, I couldn't remember exactly, you see, I've slept since then..." In addition, mornings can be focused on what I'm doing this day and not what I did the day before.

I learned a trick for avoiding some of the time errors that the OP suffers from. I carry my timesheet and service reports in a three ring binder. I three-hole punch the timesheet on the right side and my service reports on the (normal) left side. My time sheet is on the left and easily referenced for times and job numbers as I fill out the service report on the right side. It is extremely rare for me to not charge time to a job number.
 
we use exaktime w/ blackberry phones.


you can also install on a gps pda, but it must be phsyically synced @ the office w/ the computer.

w/ the blackberry, it syncs the time wirelessly over the network.


its quick and easy.
 
ptonsparky said:
I would just like the two sheets to match. If two guys are on the same job, the same day and they ride together you would think that their tickets and time would match.
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Oh, well that's a different animal, of course those should match. I thought that you meant that the time on the job tickets wasn't adding up to the time on the time cards, which shouldn't match.
 
ptonsparky said:
Our job ticket times should match the time card. Plus the guys inablility to coordinate their whereabouts.
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I guess I don't understand unless you're using real time billing.

My time sheet says 7:00-12:00 & 12:30-4:30. My daily work sheet Says that I was at X job from such a time to such a time, meetings are meetings, plan checks are plan checks. Filing, paper work and data input are office time, getting gas or getting the truck washed are just the cost of doing business and can't be billed to anything.
 
cowboyjwc said:
I guess I don't understand unless you're using real time billing.

My time sheet says 7:00-12:00 & 12:30-4:30. My daily work sheet Says that I was at X job from such a time to such a time, meetings are meetings, plan checks are plan checks. Filing, paper work and data input are office time, getting gas or getting the truck washed are just the cost of doing business and can't be billed to anything.
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every place i have worked all of those things are charged to a job code. there are job codes for sick, vacation, and other indirect but the things you mentioned are mostly project oriented and get charged to a specific project.

you would not need to be washing or filling up the truck unless you were driving to a project so why is that not project related? if the owner does not want to bill it to the customer, that is a different matter entirely.

time i spend in the office preparing to go somewhere is charged to the customer as office prep. so is the time i spend doing reports and unpacking my computer and stuff when I get back.

A friend of mine worked on a project funded by DoD. they had to take a class on how their time sheets were to be filled out. near the end of the class, the instructor asked them what the time spent in the class should be charged to. about half wanted to charge it to the project and the rest said indirect. the answer was 'to the project" because it was the only project in house that particular timekeeping system was used on. Several months later the instructor came by to chat with him one day. he had become what amounted to the auditor the company used to insure the time sheets were filled out correctly. they were just chit chatting about nothing in particular. when he left he asked what the time spent yakking was to be charged to. indirect - not project related.
 
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cowboyjwc said:
I guess I don't understand unless you're using real time billing.

My time sheet says 7:00-12:00 & 12:30-4:30. My daily work sheet Says that I was at X job from such a time to such a time, meetings are meetings, plan checks are plan checks. Filing, paper work and data input are office time, getting gas or getting the truck washed are just the cost of doing business and can't be billed to anything.
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And they still get a billing code of "non billable" or something similar. You are still tracking employee time.
 
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