Timesheets
Whether you pay your employees or subcontractors per hour, per day or on price; Timesheets are vital. Without proper, detailed timesheets you have no hope of knowing job profitability, staff efficiency or staff attendance.
Below is a short run through of the features and benefits of the timesheet section of our Apps. Note all the items below are all optional, they can be disabled if required.
Start & End Time
Our time sheets work as simply as an old fashioned clocking in machine. When the guys get to site they go into the App, into the job and then create a start time. Once they have finished onsite they do the same process to add an End Time. Even with the App closed, this takes less than 1 minute.
Notes
The aim of our Apps is always to reduce time spent doing admin and/or management type work. So we want to avoid staff calling the office to explain why they were late or went home early. Which we eliminate by adding a note box. Which we also call it the confession box. If someone repeatedly doesn’t do a full days work, but never explains why, you might want to have a little chat.
Signature
The signature box is here for purely psychological reasons. A signature is the most conclusive way to signify agreement. Most people would never sign something that they might want to later back out of. So by getting employees to sign they are legally agreeing that the time they have entered is correct. Given that later you’ll be calculating wages from it, misleading time figures could mean they are defrauding you.
Timestamps and GPS Stamps
We allow the employee to enter any start time or end time they like. But to keep them honest we also perform 2 hidden checks. The first is a timestamp to record when the start time and end time is created. This counters them arriving at 0930 yet putting their start time as 0900. The second check is the GPS stamp. This records where the created the start and end time. This stops them clocking in at the sandwich shop at 0900.
Rules and Regulations
Building on what we have said above, we can add even more stringent rules to further reduce management time. The first one that almost all our clients have is to have the App generate wages from the time entries. This solves the problem of employees coming up with excuses or refusing to use the timesheet section. So if an employee decides they don’t want to do a time entry, their wage will be zero for that day. You won’t be surprised to hear that people are fast learners when its hitting them in their pocket.
Other rules we have implemented for our clients are:
- You cannot create a time entry if the GPS is turned off
- You have to create todays time entry today, not yesterday or tomorrow
- You can only create one time entry per day
- You must be within 500m of the site in order to create a start or end time
- If the time entry has a start time and end time, you have to sign it
- Its failsafe. Unless the employee creates a valid time entry, their wage for that day is £0.
These are just examples. You might need some, none or different ones to the above. We can customise the timesheet to your exact requirements.
Total Labour Costs
How do you know if a project is on track to make a profit? With our Timesheet App you can see the labour cost and therefore profit, on a day by day basis. Giving you the opportunity to take action to resolve the issue.
Effective Rates
One of the common arguments against using timesheets is “all our guys are on day rate”. We counter this by calculating the Effective Rate for each employee. Which is simply their day rate divided by the number of hours they worked. So let’s assume this is your typical employee:
£160 per day ➗ 8 hours = £20
What about if the timesheet system showed the same person wasn’t ‘pulling their weight’
£160 per day ➗ 6 hours = £26.67
By skimming hours off their day, this second employee has given themselves a 33% pay increase. In our App the effective rate can be tracked per person per day.
How Much Is He On?
There’s nothing better to lower staff moral than for them to find out that someone else is on 15p per week more than they are. So by default we only let App users see their own time entries.
Track Labour Cost By Location Or Work Type
Sometimes just having a total figure for labour costs against a job is not enough detail. If required we can get the employees to associate their time with a particular location or work type. This is ideal if the job has distinct stages (first fix, second fix) or locations (plot 1, plot 2). Splitting the time this way means you can see more details and find where, what or who is reducing your profits.
No Signal Required
If required, the App can be made to work in offline mode. This means you can open and use the App with no mobile phone signal. Data can be synced once they are back in signal range or at home over wifi if they have a lot of photos to upload.
Works On All Smartphones
Our Apps work on all Android, Apple (iPhone, iPad) and Windows devices. So whatever phone your employee has it works. Plus the office can also use it via any browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Edge etc).
This is important as it allows information to flow between people within the business. Which in turn lets the business operate more efficiently. In simple terms, it increases the amount of work the business can do WITHOUT increasing the number of staff.
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