We 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.