The Operating Room: Time Tracking

Tracking time spent on a job is critical. With labor as a company’s single biggest management challenge, business owners and operations managers do all they can to monitor and track their companies’ man-hours.

Also, labor is generally the largest expense item on any company’s chart of accounts and should be reviewed closely each month. If a company can control its single largest expense, it is more likely to see improved profit margins over time.

Think about how your company’s systems are set up to retrieve and track man-hours. The entire system is centered on one document in your company: The timesheet. The timesheet – not a time clock that employees must punch as they come and go – logs each employee’s time on the job and all breaks during the day.

A time clock is superfluous in providing the information needed to monitor and track hours, and using one sends a message that hourly employees are not trusted to track their own time correctly. Also, a company does not need both a time clock and a timesheet. Instead, developing a single sheet and a procedure for managing time and labor that is suitable to all parties is a better option.

Supervisors or managers should approve the completed timesheet on a daily – not weekly – basis before submitting it for payroll and tracking, so correct daily information is necessary. Ensure that all entries are coded correctly, extra billing is identified, etc. If managers wait until the end of the week to review timesheets, it is unlikely that they will remember everything the crews did early in the week.

Timesheets need to enable crew leaders to identify how many hours were devoted to the job at hand and how many hours were non-productive, such as equipment service, meetings, etc. Crews also should include one-way travel time to the job as part of their total time; therefore, the time from the end of the last job to the time they sign out is recorded as non-productive. For installation crews, there is an argument to be made for charging all the hours worked during the day to the job. This is easy to track and record, particularly if the crew is on one job all day and the load and travel hours are estimated and included in the job’s total budgeted hours.

Knowing exactly what a crew or crewmember did on a job all day is unnecessary. Rather than itemizing time spent mowing, edging, etc., the only crucial number is how many hours were spent on the job vs. the total hours budgeted for the job. Keep it simple. By asking crew leaders to track only the total hours, companies will experience better accuracy. While there are functions that can be itemized, such as time spent mulching, installing color or laying down chemicals, give some thought to what tasks need to be tracked separately and ensure that you will use the information on a regular basis. If more than five categories need to be itemized, try to reevaluate those points for efficiency’s sake.

Be sure to provide space on the sheet for the manager to sign his or her initials as a record of management approval of the hours worked. Also, provide a code or space for crew leaders to identify the hours he or she worked on billable "extras" not included in the contract and submit all necessary paperwork with the timesheet for appropriate billing.

Regardless of how a timesheet is set up, in the end it should clearly answer the following questions:

• How many hours did each person spend on the job?

• What did they do? (maximum of five choices)

• How many hours were non-productive?

• Was any work performed that will incur extra billing to the client?

Have the crew leader add up the hours on the timesheet showing total hours worked per crewmember and total hours worked on each job. This will keep the crew leader focused on the most important aspect of the business: man-hours.

With a usable timesheet, the company owner’s obligation is to inform the crew of how they are doing relative to the budgeted hours. Provide this on a weekly basis to keep job productivity and efficiency on track.

Jack Mattingly is a green industry consultant with Mattingly Consulting. He can be reached via e-mail at jkmattingly@comcast.net, through his Web site www.mattinglyconsulting.com or at 770/517-9476.