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FINANCE A SUPPLEMENT OF THE ZWEIG LETTER
Time is on our side ... or is it? Technical professionals should appreciate the importance of timely and accurate time- sheets for determining appropriate project billing and more. O P I N I O N
F or most A/E/P firms, it is the talent, technical expertise, and experience that are sold to clients in the form of hours. The form of the agreement with the client is either a contract for time and materials, a fixed-fee contract, or some variation.
The only way that the firm can accurately track the contract performance is to evaluate how many hours were planned on the project (the project budget), how those hours are expended (the actual cost), and then how those hours compare from a performance perspective. Project managers are normally assessing the estimate to complete, which compares the performance of the contract to their assessment of work to be performed. “A/E/P firms offer their technical staff great salaries, direct deposit of paychecks, exceptional benefits, incentive compensation, free coffee, and fantastic work environments. Why is it so difficult to get a time card in return?” Critical to all of this is the capture of staff time in the form of a time card, or time-entry status. Most of the angst between the financial management staff and the technical staff is the continuing issue of getting the time in when it is due and required. A/E/P firms offer their technical staff great salaries, direct deposit of paychecks, exceptional benefits, incentive compensation, free coffee, and fantastic work environments. Why is it so difficult to get a time card in return? Project managers overseeing the multitude of tasks and responsibilities rely on accurate time- tracking to contracts to generate performance assessment on the project. Without accurate and frequent entry of time to the tasks performed, the PM can be placed in a compromising position when the time cards are prepared days after tasks are performed. In fact, most project management systems – such as Deltek Vision and AJERA – allow for daily entry
of time so that tracking of performance can be compared and viewed on the PM dashboard. Additionally, applications that allow for time entry into Apple iPhone, Android, and Windows devices create efficient ways for staff to never be too far away from providing a visible and quantifiable expression of the work they do! We recently provided a project management and leadership training program to a firm that had used Deltek Vision and then integrated Newforma into its practice. By creating one point of entry for information, accurately broken down into resources, hours, and schedule, this firm could predictively review staff hours, performance to budget, schedule of tasks, and even predictive cash flow. The critical component was daily entry of accurate time data. From the president/CEO to the receptionist, everyone understood how important the entry of time was in this system, how critical it was for project managers to be able to evaluate project performance. One of the more important statements the president made to the PM was that “without frequent entry of time during the day, it is likely that we would be creating false records on our clients’ projects.” This firm was so committed to a high degree of project delivery that if someone input his or her time days after the task was completed, a call was made and a meeting was scheduled to review whether that recording of time was inaccurate or a false reflection of the task accomplished. A further degree of concern on accurate time recording is when the firm enters into public sector work at the local, state, or federal level that is governed by state or federal acquisition regulations. Not only do these entities require detailed time cards and have the ability under contract terms to audit the firm’s time card
See TED MAZIEJKA , page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 31, 2015, ISSUE 1118
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