For professional services organizations the adage “time is money” is a fact of life, however, one of the major challenges of the average project based business is time-sheet completion and accuracy. It’s almost impossible to measure and track the organization’s key performance indicators (KPI’s) without timely, accurate information of the work that its staff did on its clients’ projects.
Whether work is charged on a time and material basis, fixed price, capped price etc., its highly likely that the budget will have been done based on an estimate of the time required to deliver the piece of work.
Given the above its surprising to see so many organizations that don’t embed good time-sheet practice into their culture.
Here are 3 simple steps that organizations can take to ensure that staff complete their time-sheets in a timely and accurate manner.
1. Educate their staff.
This may sound obvious but its vitally important that everyone in the organization understands why proper time-sheet completion is important. This should be explained in the on-boarding process and reinforced by regular communications. Most importantly, senior management should set themselves as examples to the rest of the organization.
2. Keep it simple
Most organizations will set utilization targets for their staff. (These are linked to billing rates and are used to establish the organization’s desired profitability.) These targets are set as percentages, but the problem with a percentage is that its harder for employees to conceptualize.
For example, What’s easier for an employee to understand?
– You have a utilization target of 80% or
– You need spend 32 hours or more on chargeable client work
3. Technology.
A decent, intuitive, simple to use time-sheet system is very important. Let’s face it, nobody likes doing their time-sheet the last thing that they want is a tool that makes it even more of an unpleasant experience.
