Consulting billing and time and expense sheets

For any consulting firm, billing clients — that little-understood, underappreciated life blood of cash flow needed for any company to survive — is directly enhanced or badly harmed by how employee time and expenses are tracked and processed.

The reality is: good invoicing depends on the quality of time and expense sheet data flowing into an invoice. Improving your project time and expense sheets for billing is where you need to focus.

Pacific Time — when you're on the go

Pacific Time is a time and expense app for employees who need to track their time and expenses on the go.

Altogether, there are at least six ways Pacific Time can be used:

1. Project and task time tracking
2. Payroll time and attendance tracking
3. Leave management including leave requests
4. Expense reports
5. Asset tracking
6. Activity and log tracking

Still Tracking Time Manually?

Believe it or not, hundreds of companies around the world still track employee time manually, relying on cumbersome paper and Excel records to track their time worked and assets. So if this is true of your enterprise, don’t be embarrassed. You’re not alone.

The fact of the matter is that using manual time tracking methods may be costing your enterprise more than you know. They make payroll and leave calculation unnecessarily complicated, place a massive administrative burden on your payroll and HR staff, and leave your enterprise open to inaccuracies and compliance issues. As if that’s not already enough, these manual timesheets are probably unpopular with your own employees!

So what should you do? Upgrade your time tracking system with automated timesheet software.

Sad Story of Hawaii Department of Education

Picture nearly one million dollars worth of brand new time clocks still in boxes stacked in a break room. They were purchased in 2010 by a state government department in order to track employee work efforts better.

However, when it was noticed that the time clocks also needed software and cables to connect them, plus labor to configure the system and getting it running correctly, it was decided not pursue the project any longer!

If you're one of the millions of workers who track their time on timesheets, you know how tedious it can be to account for every minute of your workday. Tracking your time may be monotonous, but timesheets are an essential business tool. Since the invention of the clock, virtually every industry and profession has measured the value of labor in shifts, hours and minutes. Timesheets make these measurements possible.

Ancient wages

The modern timesheet has its roots in ancient history. The Code of Hamurabbi, a Babylonian treatise written in 1772 BC, set a typical worker's daily worker's wage at 6 grains of silver. That's about $0.25 per day, without adjusting for 3,786 years of inflation. Some trades earned less than a laborer. A tailor earned 5 grains of silver per day. A carpenter, 4 grains.

The Time Clock

An employee forgets to properly log his sick time for when he was out on Monday. Because he’s in a rush on Friday he submits a timesheet that incorrectly says he worked on Monday. His supervisor is busy and signs the time card without checking. The time card information goes to payroll and gets processed. The employee gets a paycheck the next week showing a vacation balance that's 8 hours too high, and 8 hours of regular time he did not work. 

Companies Lose Money, Time and Productivity

Employee timesheet errors are rampant in some organizations. They can happen when employees take time off but code it as jury rather than vacation. They might receive a pay differential when they work in another cost center but fail to code their hours with the right cost center number. Employees can accidentally under report work hours, or when their supervisors are not paying attention, over-report work time. Once you process these errant hours and pay employees, you now must correct these mistakes and any additional errors they create.

How much does it cost to correct pay data errors? A lot.

First, all of these errors will create the need for FICA corrections, and in some cases you will need to file IRS Form F941x which requires detailed explanations of every correction. If your FICA underpayment is greater than or equal to 2% of your total FICA obligation, you will owe penalties and interest if you do not correct errors and make these adjustment payments with your next quarterly return. 

Another area where time card errors uncorrected will hurt is for hourly worker defined contribution amounts.  These are calculated based upon hours worked.  Any errors not fixed by year end will be even more expensive to correct. 

All of these errors cause even more damage to your business, not only rippling through an employee's entire paycheck, but infecting your accounting systems, accounting costs, billable hours and invoices. All of these errors need to fixed.