Tag Archives: multi purpose timesheet

multipurpose timesheet

Why a multi-purpose timesheet?

Multi purpose timesheet, TimeControl, Swiss Army Knife, Chris Vandersluis, Christopher Vandersluis, Christopher Peter VandersluisWe often speak to organizations who have experienced the madness and heartache of deploying multiple timesheets and finding that this has made them much less effective as a result.  For those who might have never had this experience, let’s talk for a moment about the benefits and drawbacks of using a multi-purpose timesheet like TimeControl.

How did we end up here?

First, let’s talk for a moment about how organizations deploy multiple timesheets.  Clearly no one wakes up one morning and says “I have a great idea.  Let’s deploy as many different timesheet systems as we can.”  No. This happens because timesheets are needed for so many disparate processes and each of these processes first checks to see if any existing timesheet systems in the organization will meet their needs and, if not, proceeds to acquire and deploy its own timesheet.

So the payroll system has a timesheet and they aren’t interested in changing it.  Billing has a timesheet too.  That’s different from the time and attendance timesheet used by payroll.  HR needed a timesheet but just for time-off; kind of a negative timesheet.  Project management needed a timesheet that would identify not just if you were working but what you worked on and for how long as well as how much time will be needed to finish off what you’re working on.  Other timesheets may have been deployed for field-data-collection, R&D tax credits, Government auditing requirements such as DCAA and more.  So, having 3, 4, even 7 or 8 different timesheets is not impossible.

Multi-purpose timesheet benefits

Choosing a multi-purpose timesheet like TimeControl brings numerous instant benefits.  First, it reduces the number of timesheets to maintain, manage and even reconcile.  In some organizations employees are asked to fill in 2, 3 or even 4 timesheets at the end of the week.  Now, they fill in one.  So employee satisfaction goes up.  It’s not that employees like filling in timesheets, even just one.  But, if you explain that they will be going from 4 timesheets to 1 timesheet, you end up with happy employees.

Next, there’s now one version of the truth.  When you look for time data, you don’t got to multiple systems.  We’ve seen organizations where the effort to reconcile the timesheet data from a time and attendance system with a project system is monstrous.  Multiple employees dedicated to trying to figure out how the time recorded in system one reconciles with system two is not an effective use of personnel.

Auditing become so much easier.  We’ve seen this in numerous situations and with numerous organizations where previously an audit might have been impossible, now the audit is not only possible but almost instant.  When all the data is being validated in the same place at the same time, the work of an auditor becomes very simple.

Multi-purpose timesheet challenges

It’s not all free benefits.  One of the challenges in deploying a multi-purpose timesheet for bringing multiple business processes together is that the people managing those processes have to communicate with each other.  This is often one of the longest parts of a deployment.  It is extremely common for us to have a meeting where Finance is represented including Payroll and Billing, Project Management is represented and the IT department is represented almost as a referee.  In many cases, the Finance people have never met the Project people.  These teams will have to strike a balance between what each business process needs.

Flexibility also carries its own work.  When you have a system which is as open architecture as TimeControl, you have to be responsible for what you design, configure and deploy.  We sometimes see an organization deploy our multi-purpose timesheet and once deployed, the team is disbanded.  Then, a year later, no one who is a part of the day-to-day operations of the timesheet understands the decisions that were made in its configuration.  Happily at HMS, we keep all those kinds of records and documents and more than once we’ve had to regroup the different parts of the organization to help explain why they made the configuration decisions they did and how that affects the different business processes involved.

Multi-purpose timesheets can make the difference

Some organizations decide that they just don’t want to mingle processes like Finance and Project Management and are willing to accept the costs and drawbacks of deploying multiple timesheet systems but for many, a multi-purpose timesheet can be the answer to so many challenges all at once.

timecontrol

What is Referential Integrity in TimeControl?

We often talk about the auditability of TimeControl’s data but how is that accomplished behind the scenes.

Imagine this scenario.  We have an employee fill out a timesheet.  We save that timesheet.  It will be no surprise that the timesheet line and header tables have relationships with the employee table, and the charge table.  But then next week, the employee changes departments.  He is no longer in the technical department.  Now he is in the sales department where timesheet rules are different.  Plus he changed salary in the move.  He’s no longer paid the same as he was.  Plus, the charge codes he used have had changes too. They have different start and finish dates.

If I go to look at this person’s timesheet for last week, will it show the updated employee and charge code information?  It won’t.  The TimeControl design was created so that a timesheet can always be recreated as it was originally entered.  That means we have to freeze the employee and charge code data and save anything else relevant to the timesheet at the time.  In TimeControl, we do this at the time of posting.  That allows us to comply with stringent auditing requirements such as the Defense Contract Audit Agency but it also allows us to follow some common sense accounting.

If we did a costing report on the employee I just talked about, we’d reasonably expect that his cost to the company per week would be one value until the department and salary change and then a different value after that.  Also, costs to the tasks that person worked on would be at the original salary value until the department and salary change.  That would just make sense.  That, however, is not how many project-based timesheets work.

So, how do we do it?

Using referential Integrity.

It’s no surprise that TimeControl is based on a relational database.  Products like MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are all relational in nature.  But that’s not enough.  From the earliest versions of TimeControl we’ve embraced the concept of relating different records into specific records in different tables.  Here is how that works.

When a record is changed in a key table in TimeControl like the Employee Table or the Charge table, TimeControl saves the original record as a historical record and makes the newly changed record the current record.  All ties from, say, a timesheet line to a charge code line stays with the original record.

That’s huge.

So, the newly updated record is what you would see in the Charge Table or the Employee Table but you can look also at the historic records that are related to that entry from all the times the record has changed in the past.

The TimeControl Employee Table is called “Employee”.  The TimeControl Employee History Table is called EMP_HIS.  The TimeControl Charge Table is called CHARGE.  The TimeControl Charge History Table is called “CHR_HIS.

When creating reports or exports, it’s important to keep in mind that these tables are distinct and display distinct values.  Choosing the Employee Table will show only the information for that employee record that is from the current entry.  Choosing the Employee History Table will show all the associated entries for that Employee over time.

We never delete historic records.

If you look at a timesheet from a year ago, the employee for that timesheet might not even be in the company anymore.  But the employee record associated to each timesheet will be.

Referential Integrity is part of what keeps TimeControl simple on the outside but robust and flexible on the inside.