It’s All About Time

It is a well-known, perpetual challenge for project managers, especially at architectural and engineering firms, to get their employees to enter time.

Surprisingly, either employees are too busy to record their time spent on various projects or they don’t consider it important enough to spend time on that kind of non-billable, administrative task. That’s not good. Either you have workers taking on counter-productively large workloads, or they don’t take time entry seriously. Let’s assume it’s the latter.

Accurate and timely time sheets are crucial for payroll, billing, budgeting, and scheduling to be done correctly. It’s a bit dramatic to call them the crux of a successful business, but they’re close. So what do you do? You have to make sure your employees understand the importance of prompt time entry—daily or weekly, depending upon the company policy.

First, spend some time with your staff showing them how to fill and submit their time sheets. Second, tell them why it’s important and how that information gets used in your firm.

When the employees are involved in the organizational processes and workflow, they are more receptive to your ideas, policies, and procedures. If they understand the implications of late or missing time sheets, they will be more conscious about their role in the workflow. Plus, you’re answering the all-too-important “What’s in it for me?” question they have when you explain the link between their time entries and paychecks.

Your employees need to understand that recording accurate time entries against projects they work on can lead to faster billing, more cash flow, higher profitability, higher salaries, more growth, and better opportunities. It is here that a flexible, smart, and intuitive time billing software solution like BillQuick comes to your rescue. Here are the main pain points that BillQuick can address in your firms:

• With BillQuick, you get to enter time when, where and how you want it. Employees can enter time on their office desktops using any of the four built-in time entry modules, remotely at home on their laptops (browser-based Web Suite or subscription-based BillQuick Online), or on the go using their mobile phone (BillQuick Mobile app for iPhone and Android devices).
• With time entry taken care of, BillQuick goes further by providing quick and easy options for submitting those entries for approval. The whole submit-approval workflow is built-in and supported by notifications and reports.
• BillQuick offers certain modules and add-ons that further ensure that your employees don’t lag behind in entering time and expenses. Instead of nagging each employee, BillQuick Agent can be set up in such a way that it automatically sends out reminders for missing and incomplete time sheets not only to the delinquent employees but also their supervisors.

Similarly, BillQuick Outlook Add-In can be deployed so that employees don’t have to re-enter time but instead can convert their Outlook tasks and appointments into time entries with a mouse-click. They can also log the time spent on emailing as a time entry in BillQuick. It is all well-integrated and simple to use.

• BillQuick integrates your time sheets with project reports so that you have real-time data that can be shown to your staff and executives. You also have pre-billing reports that can be sent to managers or accountants for approval. In fact, you have more than 500 reports for almost everything in BillQuick.
• BillQuick lets you chalk out realistic task allocations for and with your employees on various projects. Instead of micro-managing your staff, they would be able to monitor themselves while recording time because it would show them the assigned, left, and remaining hours on each project.

All these user-friendly features have one purpose—to make your time entry experience faster, smoother, and easier.