From a design house in Texas.
Our
Staff work from 9 to 5. Ten minutes at the end of the day before they leave, they complete their daily time sheets. Every billable minute, from 9 to 5 gets recorded, ready for billing.
Can you see the problem? Sure, the company gets paid for every minute their staff work, but this is false economy. Why? Because 10 minutes of 'staff time' is being used to complete timesheets, time that could be better spent doing 'proper' company work. Instead, 10 minutes from the next day must be borrowed to complete today's expected work schedule, 20 minutes borrowed from the day after that, then 40 minutes and so on. In a week, they've lost almost an hour's work - and over the period of a year, one complete working week.
In effect, this business was paying their staff a weeks wages for every 10 minutes used to complete their timesheets. This time is not billable, and if your business has deadlines, you're already a week off track!
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An Engineering firm in Ireland.
We use our own in-house system. At the end of the day Staff itemize what they've done, and enter these into a simple time sheet.
When asked how they recorded telephone calls, work interruptions and other events that impact the accuracy of the time data collected, their reply was as follows.
We don't care about this, as all our billable time has been recorded, and we get paid for it.
The same mental trap as before, except this firm lost not only 2 weeks a year for each staff in terms of working productivity, but they also had a number of other key issues with their data accuracy, and billable time lost with staff answering telephone calls on unrelated jobs. Staff were not able to precisely recall what had happened during the day on a minute by minute basis. This firm had 126 people, and their 'in-house' system was costing them in excess of $1.5 million per year in lost billable income.
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