A diary with 'Mon: silage, late' in it
In peak season, operators start early, finish late and move between jobs. An operator might roll for one customer in the morning, drive a trailer at silage in the afternoon and bale into the night. Hours are recorded in a pocket diary, on the back of a worksheet, or by text on Sunday evening: 'Mon silage late, Tue 6 to 11, Wed rained off at 2'.
The office has to turn that into wages, and into a record of how long each job took. Late finishes, breaks taken in the cab, time spent travelling between farms, and the half day of maintenance in the yard when it rained, all have to be worked out. By the end of silage, nobody remembers exactly what happened on the second Tuesday.
Why hours are so hard to capture
Operators are not trying to be vague. The working pattern makes precise records hard, and nobody gives them an easy way to record them.
- Start and finish depend on weather and crop, so there is no fixed shift.
- One day covers several jobs, customers and machines.
- Travel between farms and time in the yard servicing kit are part of the day too.
- Breaks are irregular and often not taken as a clear stop.
- Worksheets are designed for charging customers, not for recording the operator's time.
Working time, rest and pay rules apply to operators like any other staff, and some contractors have their own arrangements, such as seasonal hours averaging. We do not advise on those. Your payroll provider or adviser does. What we can do is make sure the hours going into the calculation are right.
The cost of hours pieced together later
Paying operators accurately matters. Good operators are hard to find, and an operator who feels short-changed after a long season does not come back. Paying for hours that were not worked is a cost too, and it goes unnoticed without a record.
The hours are also the base for your job costing. If you do not know how many operator hours went into a customer's silage, you cannot know whether the price covered it. And long runs of late nights are visible only in hindsight, when it is too late to plan the rota around them.
Hours captured on the operator's phone
What we build is a time record that operators fill in as they go, tied to jobs, with a weekly summary for pay.
- Operators tap start when they begin the day, whether at the yard or at a farm. The time is recorded, with location if you choose to use it.
- When they start a job, they pick it from their day's list, which records the switch from one job to the next and the machine they are on.
- Travel between farms is recorded as road time, and yard time for servicing or repairs as workshop time, each with a tap.
- Breaks are tapped as they happen, or added at the end of the day if they were not.
- At the end of the day they tap finish. Missing taps can be added afterwards with a note, which you see flagged.
- Each week you get a summary per operator: days, hours by type, jobs, and any flagged entries. You approve it and it goes to payroll in the format they use.
| Time type | Used for |
|---|---|
| Job time | Pay, job costing, and customer charging for hourly work |
| Road time | Pay, costing, and road charges if you make them |
| Yard and workshop time | Pay and machinery costs |
| Breaks | Pay rules as advised, and planning rest |
Hourly customer work, such as hedging or loader work, can be priced from the same record, so operators do not write the hours twice.
The end of first cut
At the end of first cut, the office opens the weekly summary. Seven operators, each with daily hours split by job, road and yard. Two days have flagged entries: one operator forgot to tap finish and added it the next morning. The owner approves, and the bookkeeper runs payroll from it. The job costing for each customer's silage already has operator hours in it.
Looking at the fortnight as a whole, the owner can see which operators have worked the longest runs and plan the next weekend so they get a break.
Are your operators' hours recorded this way?
- Hours arrive in diaries, on worksheets or by text.
- Working out pay takes an evening or more each week in season.
- Road and yard time are not recorded separately.
- You do not know how many operator hours each customer's job took.
- Long runs of late finishes are only noticed afterwards.