The majority of construction and field services operations use paper crew timesheets to track time by job, cost or craft codes each day. The paper timesheets need to be created, printed and distributed to supervisors by administrative staff at the job site. The main advantage of automating the configuration of crew timesheets is that it allows supervisors to easily change assignments as they come up in the field . An automated field services and crew time tracking system does reduce administrative costs and eliminates double data entry. However, such a system does more:
- It displays a crew timesheet already populated with resources, including job, cost codes, craft level assignments, billing codes and default pay rates if applicable.
- Allows the supervisor to add available resources and have all the above properties of the resource fill in automatically
- Restrict the supervisor, when making or modifying assignments, to only see those cost codes or craft levels a worker is permitted to be assigned.
- Allows crew timesheets to be adjusted throughout the day as workers leave early or replacements show up.
- Where a crew timesheet's setup does not vary much from day to day, a copy previous day feature can carry forward the previous day's assignments and thereby completely eliminate any administrative preparation of a new daily crew timesheet.