“I know we must have plenty of work-in-progress in the tank this month”, a small business owner recently said to me.
“Our team are absolutely flat out, yet our billing was slightly off full capacity. I know that will be because they have spread their time over multiple jobs and have not gotten all to a completed billing stage. They will do so this month, and our billing will exceed ‘maximum capacity”.
That particular business owner will be correct, as he is always in touch with the heartbeat of his business and team.
I am sure you are, too. However, my challenge back would be, “Can you put a number on that? And what about when your team is twice the size it is now?”
This is where timesheets can help in construction or professional services firms.
Yes, I know there are passionate arguments both for and against the relevance of timesheets in the 2020s. I would love to air them here, but I will not, so to keep this blog shorter.
A good time system is not about watching or not trusting people.
It can tell you things like:
🔹 What out-of-scope time has been recorded, which we can now remember to bill?
🔹 What is my work-in-progress (WIP) figure across all jobs?
🔹 How far is each job away from reaching the next billable phase?
🔹 What % of the time budget has been spent to date on each job?
🔹 What has my team been doing in terms of concentration or spread of time across key jobs?
Here at Avant Advisory, we help our clients design their time systems.
In doing so, we try to balance the competing needs:
1️⃣ There will not be a single person on this planet who wakes up thinking, “I cannot wait to complete my timesheet”. Therefore, the process must be made as simple and as quick as possible with the least barriers to inputting.
2️⃣ At the same time, if you don’t have the right job and task codes that are relevant to you, you will not be able to pull out the analysis you need
3️⃣ At the same time, if you make that too complicated, you will have more trouble in compiling a holistic, top-down view of your business and aggregated team resource allocations for analysis and decision-making.
What are the best and worst features of the time recording and reporting systems you have worked with?