We use to have paper time cards.  Employees would fill out their start time, stops time, break time and which project they worked on (for job costing).

Before running payroll every two weeks, our General Manager would sit down after dinner and enter all this information into the computer. During our peak employment in the summer — when we have 30 employees or more — the process could take upwards of 5 or 6 hours.

We also tended to have input errors. Employees might enter a project job number that was invalid. The General Manager also had to convert time from a 60 minute scale to a decimal scale. For example,  an employee that worked from 7 a.m. until 2:15 p.m. with a 30 minute break, would have to be entered as 6.75 hours. While the GM did a yeoman’s effort, it’s impossible to expect anyone to enter hundreds of lines perfectly.

A few years ago, we decided we had to find a way to harness technology to make this process easier and more efficient. So we coded a new interface that integrates with our Job Management System (JMS).

Here’s how the system works now.

Each employee has his or her own login, and they enter their own time at the end of each day. They can do this using either a traditional computer or their smartphones. When selecting the project job number, the system uses logic to only allow valid jobs to be entered. And a time slider is used so that employees enter their actual times to the minute — and the system converts it to decimals for reporting purposes.

This new system has a ton of great advantages.

• A key employee doesn’t have to waste 10-12 hours a month doing data entry.
• Entry errors are greatly reduced, both for job costing and calculation of hours
• There is better accountability because employees are entering (and approving) their own time before it is submitted. Nothing is worse than having to correct hours paid on a subsequent payroll. Those scenarios have been almost eliminated.
• Knowing how many hours employees have in real time allows us to greatly address and reduce overtime. If Employee A is close to or over 40 hours on Thursday afternoon, we may decide to schedule Employee B to work on Friday instead.
• Reporting time to the minute becomes much easier when the system converts from a 60 digit scale to a 100 digit scale. And reporting to the minute reduces time reporting fraud. When employees are instructed to “round to the nearest quarter hour” or some similar convention, this rounding is invariably done in the employee’s favor.
• Filters and sorts can be employed to analyze employee reporting behavior and catch potential inconsistencies or fraud. For example, we could look at all employees who worked on a particular project on a particular day. Why did Employee A clock out 30 minutes later than everyone else on that crew?
• The system allows special job codes so we can better track the cost of employee activity that is allocated to overhead activities, not specific jobs. This might include maintenance, light duty, training, etc.

Get your company into the 21st Century, and start using digital timesheets immediately.