Tag Archives: crew timesheets

Supporting contractors in your corporate systems

Contractors, TimeControl, TimeControl Industrial, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisWe 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.

TimeControl Industrial Extended Rates resolves numerous business costing situations

Extended Rates in TimeControl Industrial and TimeControl Industrial Online are designed for many different business challenges including hazard premiums, extra pay for different shifts, variance between regular, overtime and double-time and so much more.

TimeControl’s rate structure is so extensive that we can’t cover it all here.  In fact, there are several resources worth looking for on the website including the white paper “Creating your Rate structure” on the White Paper page at: TimeControl.com/resources/whitepapers.

For today’s conversation, let’s look at just one powerful aspect of the TimeControl Rate architecture, the Extended Rates functionality of TimeControl Industrial and TimeControl Industrial Online.

Extended Rates works a bit differently than a normal rate table.  In the case of Extended Rates, TimeControl will try to match fields that have been filled out on the Crew Timesheet or regular timesheet with fields that are in the Extended Rates table.  Imagine for a moment that you have different rates for different projects and different rates within each project for different roles.  Then imagine that there are premiums for working on the day shift vs. the night shift and additional premiums based on location and the weather conditions for outdoor work.

Whew!  That’s a lot to take into account.  Let’s add some complexity to the challenge in saying that some of these premiums affect what we charge the client.  Some don’t. Some of these premiums affect what we pay the employee.  Some don’t.

TimeControl Extended Rates is ready to handle all those challenges.

Once you’ve designed your extended rates structure, setting it up is quite straightforward.  On the System Preferences page, in the TCi Settings tab, you map the timesheet field name to the Extended Labor Rates field name so that TimeControl knows how to find the right record.

Then in the Extended Rates table, you set up what might be a very long list of field combinations and their associated value.  These tables are often set up externally using something like Excel and then imported into TimeControl.

In the timesheet, user-defined fields are created to allow the entries for the values in question.  The values can be validated against acceptable values or be tied to a drop-down list to avoid typos.

Here’s an example based on the fields we set above.

Project Rate Role Shift Location Conditions Internal
Cost
External Price Average Project
Polar Regular Engineer Day NYC Dry $40.00 $65.00 $50.00
Polar Overtime Engineer Day NYC Dry $60.00 $80.00 $75.00
Polar Double Engineer Day NYC Dry $80.00 $80.00 $75.00
Polar Regular Engineer Night NYC Dry $50.00 $75.00 $60.00
Polar Overtime Engineer Day NYC Dry $75.00 $90.00 $75.00
Polar Double Engineer Day NYC Dry $100.00 $100.00 $75.00
Polar Regular Engineer Day NYC Storms $50.00 $65.00 $50.00
Polar Overtime Engineer Day NYC Storms $70.00 $80.00 $75.00
Polar Double Engineer Day NYC Dry $100.00 $100.00 $75.00
Polar Regular Engineer Night MIA Storms $60.00 $75.00 $60.00
Polar Overtime Engineer Day MIA Storms $85.00 $90.00 $75.00

As you can see, there are premiums set up for all these different options and for each line there are 3 values for Internal Cost, External Price and Average Project cost.  You can have up to 9 different values for each line.  That’s a lot.  Think of it as a 9-dimensional matrix of values per timesheet line.

We’re only showing a portion of what would be a very long list of possible answers.

As of TimeControl 8.2, you’ll be able to simplify the design of this table with the use of null-values.  This allows you to leave a cell blank and TimeControl will assume that any value for that cell is then a match.  For example, let’s say the list above is the same for all projects, not just the Polar project.  In that case, leave the Project field blank and TimeControl will match the rest of the conditions without worry over the project being selected.  This should make creating Extended Rates table a good deal easier in the future.

Matching up the extended rates to the timesheets doesn’t require any effort.  On the timesheet, the employee or for a Crew, the supervisor, enters in the values for the entire crew or each person based on what’s the situation is.  TimeControl takes care of the rest.

There is a similar structure for Materials as these too can have different values either for cost or for billing for different circumstances.

To find out more about rates, consulting the TimeControl Reference Guide or see the white paper “Creating your Rate structure” on the White Paper page at: TimeControl.com/resources/whitepapers.