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Quick Questions: Task Warnings

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.

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Whiteboard: DCAA Compliance

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:

  1. Employees should enter hours on the day they occur, so they are more accurate and nothing is forgotten.
  2. One employee cannot enter hours for another. No ghost posting.
  3. If you make a change to previous entries, you should enter a note explaining the change.
  4. Each employee must have a username (and password) so their postings are associated with this name. That means you can’t use a spreadsheet because change to spreadsheet are anonymous.
  5. Employees must submit timesheets so there is an electronic signature associated with this action.
  6. Managers must approve [submitted] hours for employees.

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Quick Questions: Expense Templates

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:

  1. Mileage, driving to and from a client office
  2. Items you resell to clients on a regular basis
  3. Shipping and receiving the same items and weight

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:

  1. Enter the number of miles to the client office
  2. Enter a quantity of items you resold to clients
  3. Enter a quantity of items you packaged and shipped

 

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Whiteboard: Customize Client Invoices

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.

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Quick Questions: Graphical Timesheet

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.

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Quick Questions: Time Off Requests

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.

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Quick Questions: Sync Apps with Cloud

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.

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Quick Questions: Billing Rates By Role

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.

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Quick Questions: Resource Allocation

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.

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Quick Questions: Client Billing Rates

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.