A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
While sending out invoices to clients why not customize them? Start with your logo. Then update the fonts and colors to your corporate style. Add some graphics and colored text blocks
The Standard Time® invoice templates are simple RTF documents. So all this is easy in MS Word. Once you have your client invoice the way you like it, all your new invoices will use that new format.
Timesheets can display a huge amount of textual information. And that can drive some of you nuts. So here’s an alternative.
A graphical timesheet.
The graphical timesheet displays time log records in block form, sort of like your Outlook calendar. Each block represents a single time log or time off request. Start and stop times are plotted on a weekly calendar so you can easily see which day and hour they fell on.
Drag and dropping time logs simply changes the start and stop times, or the duration, depending on the drag operation.
Every employee, business owner, independent contractor, consultant or small business owner takes time off from their job. The following video will show how Standard Time® handles vacation requests.
New hours are accrued periodically, and hours are subtracted from that bank as time off requests are approved. Manager receive an email notification when time off is requested. And employees get another email when the request is approved or rejected.
You can use your smartphone for tracking time and expenses. The information goes directly to your boss. Well sort of. 🙂
It goes up to the cloud or desktop, depending on how you sync your time and expenses.
Is that better?
The good thing is that your Android or iOS time tracking app syncs with something. It gets data from the phone to your on-premise database. Just give it a URL to sync with, and any records you enter will automatically be sent.
That means you can track time anywhere. Even in the office. Think about that… you can pull out your phone and track project time, even in a meeting, or in front of your computer. You don’t to touch a keyboard if you don’t want to.
For each project an employee may have a different role and different billing rate. The following video shows how to organize them.
Consider that on any given project, employees could take a different role or responsibility. You may be the team lead on Project A, but just an ordinary engineer on Project B. A colleague may be the project manager today, and customer liaison tomorrow. Roles change. Responsibilities change.
And the billing rates for each role also change.
Keeping track of who performs which role on every project is a job. And what billing rates are you charging for each? That’s another job.
Watch this video for one possible solution. This may be the one solution for the whole project team.
Find the employees that are free in your company to work on your project. The color coded chart makes life easier for the project manager.
Sure, you know approximately which projects and tasks everybody is working on, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a bar graph showing it? You can research employees who might be available for your project. Look for short bars, that indicate a shortage of work.
Clients use a variety of models when billing clients. The most common is rates by employee. In other words, each employee gets their own billing rate for each project. The collection of rates on Project A are different than Project B.
Why is this?
Because consulting firms provide a lot services, and offer the specific talents of many individuals. Plus, they have a lot of clients. That is a recipe for complex billing arrangements. The sales department gets what they can. The client pays what their willing to. And we meet in the middle. When the dust clears, there are specific rates for each project.
Other less frequently used models are “By category,” “By role,” “Option Year contracts,” or flat project rates. Fixed-fee project are quite common, where the client is billed a percentage of the total on a milestone basis. For example: one-third upon signing, one-third at beta, and one-third at delivery.
You’ll see the most common billing method in this video.
Follow these simple steps to create a project task that is displayed in the timesheet. Scroll down for a video.
Why track time with project tasks? Because you will be tracking much more information that just a project. It takes the same amount of time to enter hours for a task as it does a project. But a project task contains other information that you can use to better understand the execution of your project.
For instance, project tasks are associated with categories. Each category describes the type of work you performed. You can run reports or comparisons on categories.
Project tasks also contain other fields that differ from task to task. So choosing the appropriate task means you are also choosing those other data point. Again, use them in reports to learn more about where your time is spent.
Other useful association may exist, such as payroll information, estimates verses actuals, and link dependencies based on task completion, and warnings when tasks are nearly finished.
During the manufacturing process you are able to keep track of the time spent on each product, follow your employees time and you’ll know how much time was spent on each task.
Just add a barcode label to your work orders or products. Scan them during the manufacturing process. And you’ll know how much time you spent per piece, per project, and per employee. Use those numbers to reduce manufacturing time and increase efficiency.
Look for a free barcode font named IDAutomationHC39M_FREE.otf. Install this and use MS Word to create barcodes. Simply type *MyProject* into Word, and then change the font. You’ll see a barcode label where your text was.
You’ll need to scan the employee name, a category, and the project. This is enough information to start the timer in Standard Time®. Then can the word “STOP” (without the quotations). The timer will stop and you’ll have some new information you can begin to use to improve your business.
A pay period is a regular length of time over which employee time is recorded and paid. Examples of pay periods are: weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly and sometimes yearly.
Setting up your timesheet to reflect pay periods instead of weeks has some benefits. First off, you’ll see the number of scheduled hours in each pay period. You can compare that with the number of hours you’ve entered. Employees quickly know what’s expected of them. Next, if you are required to submit timesheet for review, you’ll be submitting the entire pay period rather than just a week. This saves time for both employees and managers.
Manager also approve a full pay period when reviewing, and usually lock timesheets so they cannot be edited after review.
Pay periods also show up on reporting windows so you can run report for a known date range that corresponds to your payroll cycle. Same is true of exporting to payroll apps. Using a predefined payroll period date range reduces the possibility of error.