Software pays staff correctly

Timesheeting software - used to keep an accurate and reliable record of the hours staff work, where they work, and the work they do - could save New Zealand businesses thousands of dollars and hours of administration effort; particularly if the business employs cash workers such as office cleaners or site labourers who work unsupervised.

Before developing and using timesheeting and billing package, Wellington construction firm P&A Construction says it was buried in paperwork and paying staff the wrong amounts.

"The amount of paperwork we had to do to complete manual timesheeting was huge and it was eating up valuable business hours," says managing director Phil Stewart.

Paula McKenzie, office manager for the firm, says previously managers at each site had to note down daily hours for each worker and then send that information to head office every fortnight for pay to be processed. The information then had to be married up with the labourers' own invoices. McKenzie says P&A Construction would have to pay on invoices even when it suspected it was being overcharged because site managers couldn't be sure of who had worked what hours so far down the track.

"If labourers were moving between different sites of ours it was a nightmare to try to verify the correct hours because different foremen were involved," says McKenzie.

The firm decided to implement an online timesheeting package called CostCop - hosted, backed up and kept secure online by Debonair and co-developed by P&A Construction after the company discovered it couldn't find timesheeting software to match its needs.

P&A Construction site managers now enter multi-site timesheet details into CostCop over Telecom's mobile data network and using Harrier smartphones. McKenzie says once the system was up and running the company had a sudden reduction in the hours it was being charged for.

"It all changed because workers knew their invoices would have to match our timesheets. I hate to think how much we were over-invoiced for," says McKenzie.

She says P&A Construction is able to keep track of specifics such as how many hours people work on its sites, for how long, and on what specific tasks. If the software data suggests someone is working more or fewer hours than agreed, it will raise an 'exception' or a 'software flag' against that worker.

So if 'Jon Doe' is supposed to do nine hours on Wednesday and the company sees only four entered, the site manager will receive a 'please verify' message to their smart phone. That manager might then remember they sent Jon Doe to another site and will pass the 'please verify' message to the second site manager who will know Jon worked an additional five hours on Wednesday but realise it wasn't entered into the online application.

"Once the foreman updates the information, we can see Jon's nine hours accounted for. Or it can be verified that he only worked four," says McKenzie.

She says while she initially spent time chasing site managers to send through staff hours on a daily basis and respond to the 'please verify' flags the software raised, this eased off after managers became used to the application and were in an established routine of entering hours for each worker.

So where can you buy timesheeting software?

As a standalone solution, timesheeting solutions are thin on the ground and few have been adapted to work in the mobile office environment which is why P&A Construction ended up helping to develop their own.

However, timesheeting is a common feature of general business administration software and is also included in financial management, small business ERP and accounting software. Timesheet layouts typically provide either weekly or monthly with space for daily comments including a detailed description of tasks performed.

Anecdotal evidence from financial software specialists suggest small businesses don't use these timesheeting features and may not realise they're there. That's a pity say the specialists, because inaccurate timesheeting affects budgets, forecasts, labour calculations and can result in employers and customers being over or under-charged - as P&A Constructions knows. (Although timesheeting applications bundled with other software are often designed with bigger businesses in mind and so can be less than intuitive to use.)

Katherine East, a spokesperson for Telecom Mobile, says the rarer solution of timesheeting software run over mobile devices helps small businesses to understand their costs, learn which services are profitable and help track staff productivity.

Backing this up, Stewart says P&A Construction now contracts out gibbing work after analysing timesheet hours and discovering using its own staff for gibbing wasn't cost effective.

"Once we could see the hours we spent gibbing, we realised how much we could save by contracting it out," says Stewart.

Clearly, there are benefits for those that take the time to timesheet properly.