What is the objective of a timesheet?

The objective of capturing time on a timesheet is generally to determine effort required to deliver client work.  The result of capturing this time is two-fold:

1)      Conversion of effort into invoicing actions

2)      Determination of estimation accuracy and metric refinement 

The conversion of effort into invoicing actions depends on the contract terms for invoicing. For Time and Material contracts, each hour may be converted to a monetary value (hour times bill rate/hr) for customer invoicing.  There may be limits to the hours per day or rounding to bill minimum/maximum values based on customer negotiations and agreement.    For scheduled invoice payments, a fixed fee amount may be triggered based on % complete of a project or part of a project.  As time is captured, the % complete of work delivered increases and is factored into invoicing.

What about that ‘extra’ time you spend on the client project or as part of customer relations that is non-billable?  Generally you should capture this on a timesheet as well, either as part of the project or as part of a company driven customer relationship activity, so you can truly see how much time is spent in ensuring quality and accuracy of customer engagements.  When including this type of time on a project, make sure your timesheet system can handle identifying non-billable activities which are not considered part of the invoiceable drivers.   Shadow resources learning how to deliver engagements may end up recording their time within the project as they are aiding to a limited degree with the customer deliverables but their time is not really part of the overall scope.  Make sure you can easily distinguish shadow effort from scoped and planned effort to avoid impacting metric capturing.

Metrics capturing is a valuable activity to ensure your scoping is accurate and your project managers or leads are able to manage project to budget.  What you need to be careful of here is ensuring everyone records all of their hours worked on the project and not set an artificial cap of effort per day simply because this was how the project was budgeted.  By forcing users to limit their hours entry on timesheets simply due to a defined budget you are also limiting your company’s ability to refine scoping efforts for accuracy and understanding the effort is actually takes to deliver the engagement.

But there are usually two other groups that drive timesheet objectives:  Sales and Human Resources.  Sales drives timesheets by capturing effort for presales and sales support actions. This includes demos, engagement scoping, and customer visits.  I find many companies work to capture ‘cost of sale’ by customer or even engagement and this definitely drives the structure of how time needs to be captured to meet this requirement. 

• Do you capture effort per customer?  To drive investment cost review by customer type
• Do you capture effort per salesperson?  To review support investment required per salesperson
• Do you capture effort per engagement? To drive cost investments per type of offerings or solution selling perhaps
• Do you capture effort as a general presales bucket?  To understand overall cost to support sales

Capturing cost per engagement is the most detailed and the most difficult to keep accurate simply due to how many opportunities employees may be working on or how quickly the sales cycles run.  I generally see a general presales time capture to measure overall investment.  However, by salesperson and by customer are also close seconds to help answer other internal questions from management.

Human Resources drives timesheet requirements by tracking those company benefit type activities such as vacation, sick time, holidays and floating holidays, etc.  If there is a benefit plan within your company that has a defined bucket of days or hours per type of time, then you really need to include this in your timesheet requirement.  And it may not just be ‘how can I record time by type’.  You may need to include ways to alert the users when they are close to using up all of their hours in a certain bucket (like being close to using up all of their vacation) or even have the system keep track of bucket management policies (like earning sick time each year and rolling over balances at year end).   Get your HR rep in the room when you are defining timesheet requirements so they can define not only time tracking and bucket management requirements but also a slew of reports that will make their , and your employees, life easier to manage and enforce company benefit policies.

Timesheet objectives may seem simple but they get complex quickly when you think about all of the questions you need to answer based on hours from your salary and hourly resources….I’m just sayin’.