Blue Flavor

photo

Paper Timesheets

January 25th, 2006 at 11:08 a.m.

Over the months we’ve gone through a lot of different methods of tracking our time spent on projects and it has proved to be a harder challenge than we expected. One would think that this is a problem that has been solved, but we’ve had a hell of a time getting it worked out, until we reverted to the basics of technology… paper.

How we Bill for Our Time

First you have to understand how we track time and bill our clients, we are pretty strictly an hourly or time and materials operation. We will do a per-project rate from time to time, but often only for very fixed-scope projects (look for a post on how we bill next week).

We bill our clients twice a month, providing a summary of time spent per task and how much budgeted time is remaining. Sometimes we go over budget, and often we are under, but this method allows us to work with our clients and prioritize effort and resources pretty close to real time.

The problem this creates is how we bill for our time. Our time-tracking method needs to show what has been billed and what hasn’t; otherwise we run into the sticky situation of billing the client twice.

Online Applications

At first we used online applications, for their convenience. We liked that fact that we could enter our time wherever we were. In the early days, before we moved into our office, we spent a lot of time working from coffee shops or our home offices. We also liked the ability to see reports on where time was going whenever we wanted.

The more time we billed and the more projects we worked with, this method began to fall apart. We needed to add a lot of data to each time record, like job codes, budget per phase, whether it was invoiced or not, increasingly we were using the tools in ways that weren’t intended. It was very error-prone and required a lot of double checking of work.

Desktop Applications

We also tried a variety of desktop applications designed for this purpose. The obvious choice was Excel, but there was challenges with multiple files or when on a server issues locked files for editing. Quickbooks allows you to track time, but each user needs a $199 license, and it still was no better than online solutions.

Desktop Mac applications made for design firms were overly complicated, required some sort of server component and were pretty pricey for just a time-tracking solution. At the end of the day, they still presented a lot of the same problems.

Enter Paper Timesheets: time-tracking 1.0

Finally, it dawned on us that we could just use a venerable and timeless solution.

Paper.

Electronic formats were prone to error because the solution either didn’t capture the information we needed or too many people were involved in the process.

The epiphany came when we looked at our process and said, “let’s just track our time on paper, hand them to Shelley (our accounting maven) and she will be responsible for invoicing it, storing it and reporting it back to us.” We realized if we used paper, we can transfer that information into whatever tool we want, past, present or future, a non-destructible format if you will.

Also, it’s ultra-portable, fits between the screen and keyboard of our Powerbooks when we head out, and it’s a handy reminder to record your time sitting on our desks in the office.

Making the Timesheet, Printable CEO Style!

At Blue Flavor we are big fans of David Seah’s Printable CEO, we use it every day to help prioritize our work. We love the concept and the style, so we turned the Printable CEO into a Timesheet.

The first version was little extreme, tracking your hour by hour progress on a project of task. While we think this Timesheet would work really great for internal teams, it didn’t really do it for us. But inclusion of a PCEO-style action item list was a clear winner.

Blue Flavor Hourly Timesheet

With a few tweaks we came up with a more manageable version, which only has one bubble per day per project. Each bubble is sub-divided into four sections, so if you spend a few hours here and a few hours there you can track them in each division. Basically we learned that the ideal solution needs to be flexible to each resources work style: whether you want to track your time as hash marks, numbers or just the total, you can record it however you prefer.

Blue Flavor Daily Timesheet

We also borrowed the dotted lines from the Task Tracker. This allows someone to indent sub-tasks if they prefer.

Open the PDF with Illustrator, drop in your logo and you are good to go.

Brian Fling

More Information