11
FROM THE FOUNDER
The great timesheet dilemma
Most firms in this business still struggle to get their people to do their timesheets and turn them in – but there could be a simpler way.
T imesheets have always been a big deal for architecture and engineering firms. After all, the only thing we have to sell is our time. That is it! And if our people don’t track that time accurately, we not only don’t know what our costs are to do a given task or project, we also can’t accurately bill our clients on many jobs where the contract calls for hourly billing rates, or time and material. Not to mention the fact that management of firms in our industry are usually preoccupied with “utilization,” i.e., how much of someone’s time is charged to billable projects, because in general, higher utilization means more revenue and less overhead. That’s understandable.
Mark Zweig
Most firms in this business still struggle to get their people to do their timesheets and turn them in. It usually requires many emails, and sometimes even phone calls or visits to certain people who either lack the discipline to get them done, or those who actively resist doing so for one reason or another. Sometimes companies even threaten their people with withholding their paychecks if they don’t turn in their timesheets. All of this causes great stress for those responsible for accounting and billing, because it puts them in conflict with the offenders who haven’t done their timesheets. These accounting and billing people have to be the “bad guys” on this issue. Nobody
enjoys that. The adversarial relationships timesheets cause are not healthy. One issue that I believe many in this business don’t understand is that of unbillable project or time categories. The typical firm creates more and more of these over time. There are unbillable codes for all manners of leave – vacation, sick, holiday, bereavement, maternity, and more. Depending on one’s leave policies, these may be necessary. But then there are a whole lot more of these task or time
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER SEPTEMBER 19, 2022, ISSUE 1457
Made with FlippingBook Annual report