Friday afternoon timesheets
You employ your own joiners, labourers and a couple of multi-trade operatives. They spend Monday on one job, Tuesday and Wednesday on another, and Thursday morning back on the first to fix something before the client visit. On Friday they fill in a paper timesheet, or text the office, or tell the foreman who tells the office. The payroll clerk makes it add up to the right number of hours. Which job the hours go to is a best guess.
When the cost report comes out, one job looks cheap on labour and another looks expensive, and nobody trusts either figure.
Why hours end up in the wrong place
Payroll only needs total hours per person, so that is what gets checked. Job allocation is a second question nobody is paid to answer, and by Friday nobody remembers the detail anyway. The office cannot check it, because they were not there.
- Timesheets are filled in at the end of the week from memory.
- Moves between jobs in a day are rounded away.
- Activity codes, such as first fix or making good, are left blank.
- The site manager signs for hours on their job without seeing hours elsewhere.
- The office types timesheets into payroll and then again into job costs.
What guessed allocation costs
Your job costs are wrong, which means your view of which jobs make money is wrong. Estimators price the next job using labour outturns they cannot trust. Dayworks and extras done by your own people are hard to prove because the hours were never recorded against them. Office time goes on typing the same hours twice, and on chasing operatives who have not handed a sheet in.
Time capture that follows the operative
- Each operative or foreman has a simple phone screen: pick the job and the activity, start, stop. Moving to another job is one tap.
- Where operatives do not carry smartphones, the foreman records hours for the gang in the same way.
- Activities are your own list in plain words, such as carcassing, second fix, making good, dayworks, snagging.
- Hours booked to dayworks or extras must reference the instruction or daywork record.
- The site manager for each job approves the hours on their job daily or weekly. Queries go back to the operative.
- Approved hours go to payroll as totals per person, and to job costing at the labour rates you set, by job and activity.
- Missing timesheets are chased automatically before the payroll cut-off.
| Operative | Job | Activity | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joiner A | Extension, Mill Lane | Roof carcassing | Monday and Tuesday |
| Joiner A | Refurb, High Street | Snagging | Wednesday morning |
| Labourer B | Extension, Mill Lane | Dayworks, linked instruction | Wednesday afternoon |
Your payroll provider or software stays as it is. We send it approved totals in the format it takes.
What the office and estimators get
Labour costs arrive on the right job and activity every week, so cost reports can be believed. Dayworks by your own people have hours to back them. Payroll gets totals that are already approved, and nobody types them twice. After a few jobs, your estimators can see what carcassing a roof or fitting out a kitchen actually took, and price from that rather than from memory.
Operatives also get something out of it. Their hours are recorded as they go, not reconstructed on Friday, so there are fewer arguments about pay.
Does this sound like your timesheets?
- Operatives fill in timesheets at the end of the week.
- Hours are split between jobs by guesswork in the office.
- Labour on the cost report does not match what site managers expect.
- Dayworks by your own people are hard to prove.
- Timesheets are typed into payroll and job costs separately.