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Tracking Agency Project Hours

We are taking a fresh look at how we track employee hours on client/billable projects and internal/unbillable projects. We are trying to get an accurate view of actual billable hours per task for each employee. We have created 2 sets of tasks - one for client jobs and a matching set of tasks marked as internal. I'd anyone's info regarding how they approach this topic.

Michelle Blair
Project Manager
SCHERMER KUEHL

We also use a set of non-billable tasks, which can be as detailed as necessary for tracking purposes (holiday, sick time, vacation time, lunch. etc, etc.) Employees must account for all time each day on his/her timesheet. All time is posted, billable time going to job tickets and all non-billable time gets posted to a non-billable internal job (we use Job#9999). That non-billable job can then be looked at to analyze all non-billable time. As Business/Office Manager I check people's time periodically to make sure all time is accounted for and posted. That being done I use the billable/unbillable time summary report. To print this report go under Snapshots to Productivity Reports. Choose Staff Utilization, put in time period you need and choose the Billable/unbillable Time Summary option. This report is a great way to see each person's productivity and/or the overall productivity of the company. The non-billable job will provide breakdowns in various ways as you need to see them with regard to all non-billble time.

Cynthia Hobbs
Business Manager
Marketing By Design

At The Grand Group in Chicago, we also track hours for internal tasks. We have set up jobs for vacation, illness, administrative and special internal jobs. Each employee, billable or not, record their hours for each week. The employee must account for the hours for the standard work week plus extra hours. With this information in clients and profits it is easy to track all hours. Our recptionist enters the time and monitors that each employee hands in their time sheet.

Joyce Monroe
The Grand Group

We do the same opening the internal jobs on a quarterly basis. Except, we require all staff the enter their own time, daily. That saves the extra clerical work.

Shannon Asquith
Business Manager
Tackett Barbaria Design Group

Ours is an in-house MarCom department at Insight for Living (non-profit). Though we don't bill hours to our internal clients at this point, we do track all employees hours to jobs and benefit time. We have each employee record their own time daily at the end of the day. Our administrative assistant has been set up to receive an autoemail each day from any user who has recorded less than 8 hours/day-which makes it easy for her to follow up with the employee. At the end of the month, C&P makes it easy to pull reports on job and employee productivity.

Don Bernstein
Insight

C& P's time tracking system came in very handy for me this week. We were looking at giving annual bonuses and trying to determine a good way to quantify how much each person "deserves". I printed a time summary by staff for the entire year. Based on this report I compared those hours to the required hours by staff (we have some part-time employees) and was able to quickly determine what percentage of overtime that people work. It sure supported the bonus calculations with hard facts! Great job C & P!

Ann Adams
Controller
J. Stokes & Associates

It is always interesting to read how different places handle this topic. We have come up with a way to closely track time utilizing the C & P Work To Do reports. After establishing a working budget/estimate by allocating dollar amounts to each task (staff person) I can simply print out the work to do list. It gives me a quick list of the jobs a particular staff person has been assigned to, the amount of hours they have been assigned, and as they (the staff person) enters there timesheet DAILY the hours automatically are adjusted. I would recommend each staff person being accountable for there own timesheet. It is more time efficient and puts the responsibility in the right place. If all the information is entered right from job opening, tracking can be a simple task. As in everything, you have to be consistent, entering and updating the right information and keeping it right. (that is the tricky part)

Chris Crandell, Logistics
Hanon McKendry