Time recording has a bad reputation in practices, and mostly it has earned it. Staff fill it in on a Friday from memory, the numbers are approximate, and nobody uses them. Then everyone concludes timesheets do not work.
The problem is usually the unit
Recording time against a week, a client or a service is too coarse to be useful and too vague to be accurate. Recording it against the specific job is both easier to remember and more useful afterwards.
Make the job list the starting point
If a member of staff opens their week and sees the jobs allocated to them, recording time is a matter of attaching hours to something already on screen. If they open a blank grid, it is a memory exercise.
Use the output, visibly
Timesheets survive when people can see what they are for. The moment recovery on a job is something the team discusses, recording time stops feeling like surveillance and starts feeling like evidence.
What it gives you back
- What each job actually cost
- Which fixed fees are underpriced
- Where capacity is really going
- A basis for pricing next year that is not last year plus inflation
Practical rules
- Allocate jobs before the week starts
- Record against the job, never the week
- Review recovery per job routinely
- Feed the hours into billing so the loop closes