We often speak with organizations who are struggling with how to integrate their contractors into their corporate systems. Payroll is rarely a problem. The contractor is almost always paid by their own employer and that employer will submit an invoice for their person’s time. It is in the project management and timesheet tracking areas where contractors become a more logistical nightmare. This is exacerbated by environments where the individuals can change from week to week or even day to day. When contractors are on longer-term engagements or working remotely, we hear about this more in relation to our standard TimeControl system. When the contractors are taken from a pool each morning or each week, this comes up more in our TimeControl Industrial product in the Crew Management module.
TimeControl’s flexibility was designed to accommodate employees from multiple sources within the same organization. Let’s look at that from a couple of different perspectives.
Authentication and Single Sign-on
Some clients report that to use any of their corporate systems, they need to on-board any workers whether they are full-time employees, part-time employees or contractors. They use this workflow to record people for payroll, vacation and system access. This can be a multi-step process that can result in additional hundreds or even thousands of employees receiving a corporate ID and can affect things like the number of licenses that must now be paid for in systems like Payroll or HR or Office systems that a contractor won’t ever use. The challenge is so daunting and potentially expensive that organizations will isolate the contractors outside those systems where functions like timesheets will now be done completely separately.
TimeControl overcomes this by having authentication systems that are defined at the user level rather than globally. On-premise staff can be authenticated in the corporate Single Sign-on Active Directory such as Microsoft Entra or other LDAP mechanism. Contractors, on the other hand can use TimeControl’s own username/password login or alternate login mechanisms. That frees up the corporation from having to bring every contractor on board the corporate infrastructure as though they are full-time employees. Better yet, this can serve to avoid multiple timesheet systems (one for the contractor and one for the corporation) that don’t interact with each other.
It’s all together but that doesn’t leave the contractor company disenfranchised
With all the data for the timesheet now in one place, some contractor companies can be concerned they will lose access to their own employee’s timesheet information. With TimeControl nothing could be further from the truth. TimeControl’s can send data automatically to the contractor either by giving them limited and filtered access to TimeControl itself or by sending regular reports automatically on a schedule via email. Data can even be sent via Excel so the contractors can automatically import that data into their own internal systems for their own payroll, billing and HR needs. It’s a win-win.
Authentication and multiple approval layers
TimeControl’s approval mechanism is extensive and known as the most flexible in the industry. Clients who use contractors are able to create an approval flow that will includes both the contractor’s representative and the corporation administration at the same time. TimeControl is designed for this kind of challenge and it’s unique. A timesheet could be approved on a remote site by both the contractor manager and the organization manager meaning that invoices from the contractor, once they arrive, will already have approvals from both sides. Imagine how that will revolutionize the invoicing approval process at the end of the month with hours being pre-approved by both the client and the contractor. We clients where invoice reconciliation times have dropped from weeks to hours. We’re not kidding about that.
From weeks to hours.
It’s all about the flexibility
When you are merging the work of multiple contractors into the same system, clients often explain to us that the blending of corporate processes was a large barrier that TimeControl was able to overcome. TimeControl’s timesheets can appear one way for one group of workers and very differently for other groups of workers. When we weave in the additional functionality of TimeControl Industrial’s Crew Timesheet Entry and Enhanced Rates, the options become extensive. Once entered, the data can be split, shared or divided up as need be in exports, reports and more.
We’ve mentioned a few things here you may want to look at some more. HMS maintains a Manage Contractors solution portal with more information on using TimeControl with both Employees and Contractors at the same time. If you’re interested in Crew Timesheets in particular or TimeControl Industrial in General, check out industrial.timecontrol.com or just contact us at timecontrol.com/contact to talk to one of our TimeControl specialists.
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