A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Here are some simple steps to view your employee’s timesheets.
Managers need the ability to check employee time so they can verify that hours are correctly logged to projects and tasks. Of course, employees can’t look in on other people’s time, but administrators can if they have permissions to do so.
Simply follow these steps to check your employee timesheets.
Your timesheet can be closely tied to your payroll pay periods. One way is to configure it to show all the days of the current pay period instead of just one week.
video below
Most timesheets show only seven days. But sometimes employees wish to see the full pay period so they can make sure all the working days are filled in. Nobody wants a short paycheck just because their timesheet isn’t filled in. It’s nice to see a weekly view from Monday to Friday, but sometimes even more helpful to see the full pay period.
Here’s what you see:
If you’re in a consulting firm, you know that billable hours are your livelihood. Losing hours is not an option. Lose too many, and you’ll be consulting somewhere else. Every consultant must be utilized to the max, and every hour must be accounted for.
Time is money. scroll down for a video…
In that light, the management overhead of submitting and approving timesheets is a small price to pay for accurate billing. Think of it as another set of eyes on your most valuable asset — consultants, and their billable hours.
Managers can view a list of employees who have submitted their timesheets. Emails go out to those who have forgotten. Another email goes to managers, and lists employees who forgot. Now managers can check each timesheet and approve it.
What are they looking for? Correct time under clients, projects, tasks, and time periods.
I’m surprised at how few people know what task linking is. In fact, they may have never linked two tasks together. Sure… they track time to project tasks. They know the value of comparing estimates with actuals. And they see the value in completing tasks on a timely basis so they can be closed out and newer tasks started.
But they don’t link one task to another. (scroll down for video)
Linking tasks is actually pretty simple. And valuable. With a Gantt chart, you’ll instantly see that one task must end before another can start. In the video below, the example is building a house, where the roofing cannot start until there’s at least a foundation and some walls. That’s what task linking is all about.
Some tasks absolutely cannot start until other things are done first. That’s called a dependency. Set up those link dependencies, and you’ll get instant value from them.
Henry Gantt invented a chart that is named after him in 1910. This chart is still active today and is used in Standard Time®. It shows the start and finish dates for tasks. And instantly shows the relationship between them.
This is a nice column to display the in the project tasks view. That is, if you are scheduling tasks in projects. Text alone is difficult to visualize. The Gantt chart instantly removes all difficulty in scheduling.
Projects are often billed on a one-third, one-third, one-third method. Meaning that you bill 1/3 of the total amount up front, then 1/3 somewhere in the middle, and then finally 1/3 when the project is delivered.
Here’s an easy way to do that. Scroll down for the video
You just set up a milestone configured for a percentage of the project amount. Let’s say the deal is for $30,000. The milestone is set up for 33.333%. Multiple $30,000 times 33.333% and you get $10,000 (rounded up).
Each of the three invoices can use the same milestone. That makes fixed-price billing easy.
Are you a consultant? Do you sell blocks of support time to your customers?
Then this video is for you. Scroll down to watch.
You should consider using project tasks to represent blocks of support time you sell to clients. Here how they work:
Sweetness and cool. 🙂
What? Employees are camping out on fun tasks, and ditching the losers?
What does that even mean? (scroll down for a video to explain)
It means people sometimes like to stay where they’re at. They like familiarity. Easy work. Tasks where they can switch on the autopilot and Facebook all day. Okay, fine… Not everybody is a shiftless lay-about. We take our jobs seriously. And our careers. But still… sometimes it’s nice to just keep working the same tasks until they are just “perfect.”
Task warnings shut that stuff off.
They pop up when tasks are supposed to be nearly complete. And they stop time logging when no more time is allowed. That nudges employees to move on and finish projects up. Heck, you can’t afford not to these days.
The government is a huge bureaucracy that has many rules. When you have a government project they require rules for tracking your time. Any easy way for tracking your time is with Standard Time® which has DCAA compliance built in.
Employees on your team will have to follow these rules, plus others:
Expense templates simplify entry for recurring expenses or mileage.
Scroll down for video
Let’s say you incur the same expenses on a regular basis. The happen weekly or monthly. Here are some examples:
There’s a simple way to enter these items instead of completing all the fields or all the expenses. Just create an expense template with all the fields pre-populated, and then enter a quantity into the timesheet.
For the examples above: