The Job Timesheets function is used to enter hours and costs for employees and non-employees. Costs can be allocated to jobs in a timely fashion – if proper disciplines are in place, within a few days of each week end – which presents an accurate depiction of a project’s cost. You can record time against jobs for professional or salaried staff weekly, while not affecting the payroll cycle for those employees.

Job Timesheets is designed to allocate time at a standard rate to jobs or General Ledger accounts, assets, or workshops for both employees and non-employees. Time is entered for individuals on a weekly basis, uses a review and approval process, and can be posted without regard to payroll processing. Standard activity-based rates can be set up by grade or by employee and can be varied by activity or job. Timesheets can be configured to allow the rate to be overridden when the timesheet is entered.

This feature’s best use is to allow users to capture and record time against jobs for professional or salaried staff whose payment does not depend on the pre-existence of a time-sheet, rather their costs are recovered or allocated just after the event. It assumes that you can calculate a standard cost per individual per hour.

This feature expects at least a full-days’ time to be entered for each employee otherwise it will report an incomplete day.

This feature expects time records to be entered weekly, probably by individuals themselves, but not necessarily. As stated above it makes use of a “standard cost” and cannot easily be adjusted for the “actual cost”.

Because of this, in some contracts with clients such a basis may not be acceptable.

This is not easily usable as a means of time-sheet input for payroll purposes.

The operation of this feature requires the set up in the General Ledger of two (sets) of control accounts

It is recommended that the accounts marked (1) and (2) are control accounts, probably not part of normal balance sheet reporting and that these account pairs are regularly inspected for differences.

Over the period (say) of a year these differences ought to be relatively small, and the value in (1) ought to exceed (2) – this means that at least costs have been over recovered.

Obviously any differences need to be accounted for somewhere either as a general overheads, or pro-rated across jobs in some way.

Control account (1) is determined by the timesheet employee records.

Control Account (2) is determined by your Payroll/Salaries system.

By implication then it will probably be necessary to make changes to your payroll configuration.

If you are using GL for financial reporting from Coins ERP+, changes may be required to any configurable reports to handle these control account pairs appropriately.

Generally standard costs are based on the individual’s employment costs divided by a certain budgeted or expected re-chargeable days or hours.

Example

The drawback with such exact methods that if this is done on an individual basis then

Better then, for this reason that, a grading or banding method is used to work out standard costs, e.g. all Junior Surveyors are costed at $35.00 per hour, or anyone in the salary band $25,000 to $34,999 is costs at $31.25 per hour. Also note that not all activities need to carry a cost.

Depending on the algorithm you choose it is likely that certain overhead activities would carry a zero cost, i.e. you are using the system to record such time.

These kind of activities would be holidays, sickness, unpaid non-chargeable overtime etc.