Friday afternoon, filling in the week
At the end of the week, each fabricator fills in a time sheet: job numbers down the side, hours across the days. They try to remember. Monday was mostly the frames, Tuesday a bit of the frames and the handrail job, Wednesday there was that rush bracket job. It adds up to the right number of hours, because it has to, but how those hours split between jobs is a guess.
The office types it in. The job costs are built from it. Nobody trusts them.
Why weekly time sheets are unreliable
Fabrication work is fragmented. A welder moves between jobs several times a day, stops to help with a lift, waits for parts, and goes back. Remembering all of that at the end of the week is impossible, so people round and share hours between jobs in whatever way feels about right.
- Time sheets are filled in days after the work.
- Short tasks are forgotten or merged into bigger ones.
- Waiting and helping others are booked to whatever job was nearest.
- Operations such as grinding, dressing and assembly are not separated.
- The office retypes every time sheet.
What guessed hours cost
Job costs you cannot use to judge pricing. Welding and assembly estimates that never improve, because the actuals are not real. Jobs that lost money look fine and vice versa. And office time spent chasing and typing time sheets every week.
The job booking we build
- Each job card or assembly carries a barcode. Each bay, brake, and assembly area has a tablet or scanner.
- A fabricator scans their badge and the job to start an operation, choosing it from a short list: welding, grinding and dressing, assembly, fitting, and so on.
- Scanning a different job stops the first one automatically. Breaks and waiting can be booked with a reason: waiting for parts, helping another job, maintenance.
- Hours are totalled per job, per operation and per person, and sent to your payroll or accounts system for the week.
- A job cost report shows quoted and actual hours by operation, alongside materials and bought in items.
- Supervisors see who is booked to what right now, which also helps when a customer asks about progress.
| Booked | Used for |
|---|---|
| Job and operation | Actual cost per job and per operation |
| Start and stop time | Hours without Friday guessing |
| Waiting reasons | Seeing where time is lost |
| Person | Payroll hours and skills used |
| Quoted hours | Comparing estimate and actual |
We keep it to a scan or two. If booking takes longer than the task, people stop doing it.
What the numbers let you do
Job costs become something you can base prices on. Welding and assembly estimates can be checked against what similar jobs actually took. Waiting time shows up as a cause with a number attached, which often points to the laser or the brake. And the Friday time sheet ritual, with its typing, disappears.
The team usually gets something out of it too. Waiting time that used to be blamed on the welders is recorded against its real cause, whether that is parts not arriving from the brake or a crane shared between bays. That gives supervisors evidence to fix the flow of work, instead of asking people to work faster.
Where you pay bonuses or overtime by job, the hours are clean and dated, which saves arguments at the end of the month.
Is your job costing built on guesses?
- Time sheets are filled in at the end of the week.
- Nobody trusts the labour figures on job costs.
- Welding estimates never change from job to job.
- The office retypes time sheets.
- Waiting time is invisible.