What are best practices for crew timesheet submissions and approvals?

Question

What are best practices for crew timesheet submissions and approvals?

Answer

Background

Pacific Timesheet provides a robust crew timesheet system that allows for maximum flexibility:

• Employees can work on multiple crews within a week or each day
• A variety of flexible use cases are supported:
  • John Smith can work on Crew 1 on Monday, Crew 2 on Tuesday, etc. through every day of the week.
  • He can work on Crew 1 in the morning, and on Crew 2 in the afternoon.
  • He can work on a crew one week, and be a "lone wolf" working on his own the next.
  • He can be a lone wolf this week and assigned to work on a crew the next.

To capture the benefits of this flexibility, certain best practices must be followed.

Crew Timesheet Data Entry, Submission and Approval Best Practices

1. Foremen/crew timekeepers should enter and submit (lock) data on a daily basis.
2. Individual timesheet users whose data is coded by a crew/group so it feeds into a crew timesheet, should enter and save data on a daily basis. 
3. "Daily basis" for any user here means: a) By close of business same day, or b) by the early morning (or before or at the beginning of the next day's shift)
4. Best practice is, if possible, to enter data as you go:
   • If work is divided naturally between morning and afternoon blocks, you want to enter hours data as you go
   • If work stretches through the entire day (e.g. 8.0 hours on Job 1 / Phase A), then enter hours at the end of the day.
5. If there is no opportunity to enter data at the end of a shift, due to travel, unexpected events, or end-of-day meetings, enter data at the beginning of the next day, or before the next day's shift begins.
6. If you are running a safety check or tailboard meeting first thing, you want to complete entry of the previous day's data before that begins. These meetings often include important feedback on the previous day's work.
7. Superintendents and other approvers should, if possible, approve crew timesheets at the end of the day, or before work starts on the next day.
   • This cadence allows approvers to clear out important questions about approvals before the next day's work starts.
   • It also allows foremen to gain insight and receive valuable feedback on the previous day's work, red flags (problems), green flags (wins) and missed opportunities.   
8. Daily submission and approvals ensure that actual work and hours are recorded with the highest level of accuracy.
9. Use the Safety Check/Tailboard Dashboard, found under the Assets & Logs main tab, to review the content of early morning foremen logs
   
   • These logs could provide you early warning of issues missed during the previous day,
   • You might want to provide feedback to certain foremen on missed items they should be covering with a crew, and
   • It might be a way to stay abreast of crew information where you have not had bandwidth to have direct conversations with foremen.
10. Approvers should use the Crew Timesheet Dashboard to monitor crew timesheet progress and to organize your approval activities:
    • First, throughout the day, monitor progress of crew timesheet data entry.
    • Identify and follow up with foremen not entering hours at all.
    • and/or submitting their crew timesheets. 
11. Use the Foreman Logs Dashboard, found under the Assets & Logs main tab, to review the content of end-of-day foremen logs. You can use a Foreman Log Report to review log entries for a large number of crews at a glance. When created, a Foreman Log Report can be found under the Reports tab.
    
    • These logs will provide you a quick summary of the days work,
    • Foreman Logs can bring a sharper focus to how you review crew timesheet line items for your approvals. 
    • End-of-day Foreman Logs are great inputs into the next day's work plan.
12. Have other approvers (e.g. project managers or others overseeing superintendent groups) use the Crew Timesheet Status dashboard to follow up with superintendents or general foremen on approvals and submissions.
13. Using these best practices and the Crew Timesheet Dashboard tools, no crew timesheets should remain unsubmitted or unapproved beyond 12 noon the next day.        

Payroll and Project Accounting Approvals

If crew timesheet submission and approval best practices are followed, there are key payoffs for project accounting and payroll processing:

• When crew and employee timesheets are completed, you can use mass submit features to automatically lock down as submitted and approved all crew timesheets. This feature reviews and accounts for all individual time entry approvals: crew timesheet approvals, project time approvals, and leave approvals.   
• If an employee timesheet's time entries have all been submitted, the Timesheet dashboard will display a check mark indicating that the entire employee timesheet has been submitted. If one or more time entries on an employee timesheet are not submitted, the Timesheet dashboard will show the entire timesheet as unsubmitted. The system will not give an employee timesheet a submit checkmark unless all time entries are submitted.
• The same is true for time entry approvals. If all entries have been approved, the dashboard will display a check mark indicating that the entire employee timesheet has been approved.

For systems where users follow daily submit, correction and approval best practices, this automated process will provide clean employee timesheets that are ready for review and payroll ready. From there, payroll and project accounting can run exception and analysis reports, modify data, complete payroll approvals and upload time and expense data to payroll and accounting.