I’m working on tuning up my system for tracking time and am having diffculty catergorizing the supervision/office hours. Here is what we are using currently:
Plans
Permits
Sub Cooridination
Estimates
General office
Sales
Marketing
Infrastructure
Human Resources
IT development
Professional
What would you add/remove/combine to these?
Jon Blakemore
Replies
Jon,
You need to add a category for hanging out on Breaktime. :)
Seriously I think you are overloaded with categories, to the point that your system won't get used.
My daily time sheets have 4 categories.
1. Billable hours: The time spent loading tools, driving, and working at a job. This includes directing subs on the job. (Though I have very little of this). Billable hours are broken out into various job cost categories when they are entered to invoices.
2. Over-head hours: Stuff that cannot be billed to a specific job. estimates, general bookeeping, cleaning the shop, etc. If any of this time leads to a job, I go back and re-categorize it to billable time.
3. Business developement hours: Things like developing systems, and reading sales and marketing information. Anything that is investing time that will give me a return in the future.
4. Personal hours: Time that has nothing to do with the business. Going to the dentist, having lunch with a friend, reading political threads on BT.
Even with only these 4 categories I don't always do a good job accounting for my time. But it is a big improvement over groveling around every few weeks trying to figure out where my time went. (Billable hours are accurate). It is a simple system that works for me.
Bowz
Thanks Bowz.
I'm impressed with the simplicity and usefullness of your technique. I think you're right that we might be too heavy on divisions.
Jon Blakemore
Jon,
Other than billable (job costing) and non billable(OH), look at you books from last year and see what you wish you could pull out and study seperately.
SamT
Sam,
I would love to do that if there was a "last year".
Company's about 2 months old.
Jon Blakemore
Jon,
Since your 2 months old track two things, Billable and non-billable.
When you do your end of year accounting, add one more thing to track. That one thing you want to breakout and study more.
At the end of the first qtr 05 consider if you want to add 3 more.
What you need to track is billable and nonbillable. What you want to track depends on your experience and business schema.
Tracking Sales, estimating and purchasing time would be helpful, IMO.
Purchasing uses a lot more time than you would think.
I feel that all estimating time should be posted to OH, unless you charge for proposals, as the time must be paid for by only sold jobs. It is a sub of Sales.
If you charge for Proposals, it should be a seperate Profit Center as some proposals will not lead to a job. If you rebate the cost of a Proposal when you sell a job, the price of the Rebate should be posted back or to Marketing or Sales to keep the Proposal Profit Center books straight and still show the loss of the rebate.
I am tracking the time I spend wearing each "hat" so that I will know when it is time to hire someone else to wear it for me.
SamT