Timesheet & Project Management Blog

Quick Questions: Billing Rates By Role

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 05 November 2015 21:00

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest and we’re answering your questions on how to better utilize Standard Time. Ray, today’s question kinda goes with the last question we had in the previous video about client billing rates. So within the firm I have different roles. So I have engineers, project managers, service techs-how do I get those organized within the client billing rates?

Ray: OK. So you want to set the rate on each project based on the role that the person plays; whether they are a project manager, team lead, service tech whatever they happen to be in your organization.

Bingo, that’s it.

Let’s switch over to the screen, I’m going to show you how that’s done. I’m going to start by going over to the tools menu and choosing user and organizations. We’re looking at the timesheet right now but I’m going to switch over here to look at the list of users. This is the list of users in the system, you can see this kind of hierarchy you’ve got here; properties on the right hand side. I’m going to click on a user and draw your attention to this field; the role field. In this case Buzz is a team lead. Click to another user, engineer, you can see that these roles that they are playing are different for each person, engineer here. These are the default roles that they might ordinarily or naturally play on a project. I’m going to bounce around here, stay with me. I’m going to go to the tools menu, switch over to employee billing rates. Cause this is where you set the rates based on each role that a person plays on each project. Here you have your default rates, you see those default roles; these are the client rates that you’re going to billing for the projects. You have your salary rates here, you can set those to zero if you need to. I’m going to go and look at a project where we’re overriding the rates. I’m going to collapse this, go over here and look at a project. You have your default rates there, you’ve got this overridden project. You can see that the roles may have changed. A person may take a different role on a different project and have a different rate. You can use the role rate, you can also use the default billing rate or you can just override it. I’ll switch over to another project, you see now a completely different role using the role rate in this case using the default rate. Switch to another project you see the role changing for each of these project, potentially people have different jobs that they might do for each of the projects. That is how you set the rates based on the roles that people play in the projects.

So Standard Time once again has made my life a whole lot easier. Man, the brain fog is lifted because of this, thank you so much. Download it today you’re not going to regret it. We’re answering more questions next time with Standard Time we’ll see you then.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pliRWG2n-l8

Quick Questions: Resource Allocation

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 05 November 2015 14:31

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest, answering your questions about how Standard Time works. We’ve done a lot of videos on what it does and we’re going to start answering your questions on how to actually do some stuff. Today we’re talking about resource allocation. I have these jobs that need to be done how do I find people to do them?

Ray: OK. You’re wanting to find people, employees to work on your project? I’m going to go to the view menu. We’re looking at the timesheet, I’m going to switch over to the view menu and choose project resource allocation. When I do this window pops up and this is the place to find people for your project. That’s your question, right?

Right.

Let me orient you to what you are seeing here. The bars that you’re seeing indicate how many hours people are assigned to projects. Could be one project, could be many projects. The red bars mean they’re over allocated; that means too many tasks, you’re not going to get that person on your project. The blue bars means they are correctly allocated; they may have a lot of tasks but they all fit into a normal work week. That’s fine, for a month in this case. The yellow bars are what you’re looking for. The yellow bars are where people don’t have enough work. They may have finished all their tasks, they’re running at the end of a project; you’re looking for those. So let me switch over to another user, let’s switch over to Buzz. Here’s a good example, this is a guy you want, you want Buzz on your team. The reason is he’s coming off a project, you can see the yellow bar here, he has a bunch of tasks left but he’s about done with this project. A little bit left in this time segment. Over in the next time segment he is free. Get Buzz as soon as you can. I look at some of these other users in here you see the same sort of thing. Dan is another good example, get Dan on your project because he’s finishing up too. He’s got some yellow bars, not fully allocated. You could get him starting to look at your project. But you go back and look at this user and things look awful here. Fully allocated, pretty much, until way out here. So that’s pretty much how you do it.

So really, blue and red lines don’t bug these guys. They’re busy, they might be a little bit stressed out. The yellow guys, not necessarily Homer Simpson, but they can get the job done. Sooner than these other guys can.

Yeah, right, exactly.

OK. Standard Time go down load it now. We’re going to be answering more questions in the future. We’ll see you soon.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjIfTMzCzac

Quick Questions: Client Billing Rates

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Category: Blog

Published: Wednesday, 04 November 2015 13:24

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time. We’re answering your questions about how to use Standard Time a little bit more efficiently. How’s it going Ray?

Ray: Hey.

One of the questions I have, it’s actually a question that’s personnel to me. I have a consultant firm. I have a lot of employees, a lot of consultants and billing rates going this way and that way and everywhere, it’s a mess. I feel like my head is going to explode. How can Standard Time really bring that in for me and give me peace of mind.

OK. You’re wanting to set different rates for different projects and for each employee on those projects. Let me switch over to the screen, show you how to do that in Standard Time. Right now we’re looking at the timesheet I’m going to go to the tools menu choose employee billing rates. Up pops a window let me show you first of all that we have default rates. These are the rates, you see the employees listed here on the left, and these are the rates that you would be billing your clients presumably. You’ve got salary rates here which you can set to zero if you’re not using. But you’re definitely using these. These are the default rates you can go back on for different projects. Let me go ahead and collapse this, go in take a look at a project. First of all right off the bat you see these projects can be overridden. You’ve got some default rates here mixed in but you’re overriding for this project. So you see the project listed here, this project has a different rate. I go to a different project, open that up, you see rates for that. Go to another project, so each project that I go through you can see that there are different rates for each employee. That is essentially you want to do is override those rates and make different rates for each project.

That’s awesome. Now one thing that got me giddy like a school girl is that I have international clients and consultants. You have a currency convertor built into this.

Right. Right here you’re looking at British Sterling pounds, I go to another project and you have US dollars. So yes, you can set different currencies and you can convert between those currencies for different projects in different locals.

That’s great. Go to the website download it now you won’t regret it. Answering more questions next time, see you then.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWkauYtAjZA

Quick Questions: Creating Project Tasks

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Category: Blog

Published: Tuesday, 03 November 2015 15:30

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest. Hi, Ray. We talked a lot about Standard Time can do but I’m getting a lot of other questions on how to do it. We’ve never done videos on how to actually do something. Just simple stuff, not in depth stuff. So I’m just going to pull a question out of hat of many questions and we’ll just start tackling them. How does that sound?

Ray: OK

So the first one is project tasks. It’s a simple thing to do in Standard Time. Why don’t you just show us how to actually build that?

Right. To orient you on the screen you’re looking at. You see a list of projects here on the left side of the timesheet. Of course you have your Monday – Sunday columns over here where you put your time in but the icons you see are next to projects. You then see tasks underneath those projects, there are some subprojects here that break the project down but these are tasks. If you right click on one of these you’ll open a pop up menu and you can choose new project task. Up pops a dialog box; you simple fill that in and away you go. Let me switch over to another tab, you see some tabs along the top. I’m switching over to the project tasks tab and this is a screen that managers, administrators like to go to monitor their project tasks. You can simply right click on a tasks choose new project tasks, same dialog box pops up and fill in their name, set the duration I think the task will take and then that’s all really all I have to do. This screen is useful for administrators, not so much for employees, you see the duration column, actual work, percent complete, there’s a Gantt column, there’s a lot of other columns you can put in here. But these are the one I happen to have in there. You can simply create your tasks right here that was your question where do I create them? Right here in the project tasks tab, you switch over to the timesheet it will show up right there.

That’s great, so it’s as easy as that.

And another thing you want to do when you create project tasks is make sure you assign them to people.

How do we do that?

That’s basically the same thing. If I go in and edit a task you can go and set the users here on who this task is assigned to. That means each person will see a different timesheet because certain tasks are applicable to certain people.

Great. It’s as easy as that folks. Next time we’re going to pull another question out of the mad hatter’s hat and we’ll have Ray answer it for us. Thanks Ray. We’ll see you soon. Bye.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0ctRzsYoE

Barcode Scanning for Manufacturing

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Category: Blog

Published: Monday, 02 November 2015 15:15

Written by Ray White

What would happen if you combined a timekeeping app with a barcode scanner?

You would have the most useful manufacturing tool ever invented!

Guess what?

Standard Time® did it!

Here’s how it works:

1. Add a barcode to your work orders and products
2. Scan them through the manufacturing process
3. Run a Standard Time® report to see how much time was spent

You’ll instantly see:

1. Time spent per piece
2. Time spent per project
3. Time for each task
4. And time for each employee

And now that you can measure it, you can improve it!

1. Reduce cost per piece
2. Reduce manufacturing project time
3. Measure employee effectiveness

Standard Time is the manufacturer’s best tool.

Download and try it today!

Watch the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBSMQ1X7QZo

Interview: Timesheet Pay Periods

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Category: Blog

Published: Friday, 30 October 2015 12:30

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time. Welcome back.

Ray: Hey, Mike.

I’m a little bit frustrated because there are a lot of timesheet programs out there that only show you that week. In my company we have a time period. How does Standard Time deal with that?

We have the option of showing pay periods. Your pay period may start at the first of the month and go to the 15^th of the month. The next one would go 16^th to end of month. That means that the number of days for each pay period can be different, and it’s not 7 days. You can basically see the number of days, all of those days, in your timesheet. You can see the number of scheduled hours that that includes. And then you can compare that with the actual hours that you’ve put in for your timesheet.

I have colleagues who get paid monthly. Is that possible in Standard Time to reflect that month?

Yeah. That’s just another pay period set up. You would set up monthly, from then on your timesheets are going to show all of the hours, all of the days for the entire month. Another thing that happens when you have this is if you’re required to submit your timesheet, not everyone is required that’s optional. If you’re required to submit your timesheet when you do it actually submits the entire duration of that pay period. Not just the week, you’re submitting an entire pay period whether that’s two weeks, a month however your pay periods are set up.

How can we use this?

You can go out to the web site stdtime.com. Get the evaluation version, windows, web. Set up these pay periods and everyone will see it. Now you have to be an admin to do this, normal employees can’t go in and monkey around with the pay periods and change things and all the other employees will see it and say, “What happened?” Admins, managers, executives those sorts would go in and set that up. Stdtime.com.

That’s awesome. You heard it here download your free trial version today. Let us know what you think!

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y3H_lzpCdI

Interview: Timesheet Approvals

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Category: Blog

Published: Thursday, 29 October 2015 14:22

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike back with Standard Time® with Ray White of Scoutwest the makers of Standard Time. Welcome back Ray.

Ray: Hi, Mike.

I’m a manager I have about 12 employees under me. How do I get them through Standard Time to submit their timesheets to me?

You might consider starting with an email notification. You can set up an email notification that would send an email to those employees who have forgotten to submit their timesheet. Submitting your timesheet is optional; you don’t have to do it in the program. But you as a manager want that as a sanity check, make sure the time is all against the correct project, tasks, so on, clients. Just one last check after they’ve put their time in. That would be a good reason for that email notification. When you do that you’re going to see a screen that has all the employees that you’re allowed to see. There may be other managers and they see their people. You’re going to see your people and you’re going to see which ones have submitted and not submitted. You’ll see the number of hours they have in their timesheet. You can click a button, go to their timesheet, you can either fix their timesheet if they’ve made mistakes or you can just reject the timesheet, give them a reason. Another email notification is going to go back to them saying you need to fix your timesheet. That way they can put in a reason for the change that they’ve made. You have the full audit trail, of the rejection, the change, the changes that they’ve made. For DCAA compliance or other reasons, you may want to do that. But there are either two ways to do it, you can either fix yourself or have them fix it.

So this really takes out having me to track people down saying “hey, this is wrong, can you fix it?” It’s just email, done. 

Right, there are really two emails that they could get. They could either get one that you forgot to submit your timesheet or they could get one your timesheet is not complete. Let’s say they put 14 hours in, well we want 40. They’re going to get an email that says we think your timesheet maybe incomplete. A couple of different emails that they could get.

How do I get timesheet approvals?

You can get it in the trial version of Standard Time. If you go out to our website stdtime.com you will see a download link. You’ll be able to download that, set up pay periods, set up managers who are allowed to see different employees. And then those email notifications will go out, people will submit their timesheets as they’re supposed to, you’ll see that list as a manger. You’re good to go.

Timesheet approval, it’s the sanity you’ve been looking for. Stdtime.com download your free trial version today. If you’re worried about when that free trial version ends don’t worry, super affordable. Go to the website for more information. We’ll see you next time with more Standard Time.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q__oXs32040

Interview: Email Notifications

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Category: Blog

Published: Wednesday, 28 October 2015 17:21

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest the developers of Standard Time. Welcome back Ray.

Ray: Hey, Mike.

A funny thing happened last week, put in like 14 hours, got home and realized I forgot to log my time. Is there a way in Standard Time that I can be reminded that I actually forgot to login my time?

Yes, this happens a lot. People forget; let’s say Friday they’re out the door forget to put their time in. They’ll get an email notification, early next week, Monday morning you get a notification, go in fix up your timesheet, put your time in before your boss even notices. Yep, real easy to do you just get a simple email notification for that.

Are there other email notifications that’s within Standard Time to make my life a little bit less stressful?

Yeah, absolutely. Let’s say, another example, you put in time off request. Say I’m going to take the next 3 months off for vacation your boss says “No. You can take 40 hours off.” They go in, take your request massage it, change it, you get an email notification back. There’s another reason. You might get email notifications when you join a new project. Someone put you on a new project, hey it would be nice to know you’re on this project! Maybe upcoming tasks, tasks are due. Different reasons you can get email notifications. You can set them up, real easy to do.

How can I get a hold of email notifications?

Right in our trial. Go out to stdtime.com download it, set up the trial. Now you will have to be administrator, normal employees don’t get to go in and set up, change all the email notifications. That is for administrators but you can do that in the trial. Set those email notifications up and they’ll fire right off.

That’s awesome. Stdtime.com, download your free trial version today. It’s also super affordable once that trial ends. Go check it out right now stdtime.com. We’ll see you next time with more Standard Time.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDYgA28jDW4

Interview: Mileage Tracking

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Category: Blog

Published: Tuesday, 27 October 2015 14:10

Written by Ray White

Mike: Mike with Standard Time® back with Ray White of Scoutwest, the makers of Standard Time. Ray, it’s an honor welcome back.

Ray: Thanks.

I have a scenario for you. Let’s say I am a traveling support guy. I want to write off my mileage for my taxes. How can Standard Time actually help me do that and make it easier?

One easy way is just to use the app. Standard Time has an app that you can download and just with a few taps you can put in expenses. Mileage records are really just expenses; they have a certain number of dollars you can write off per mile. You put in your destination, the odometer, the distance, vehicle, different optional fields like that. It will calculate the dollar amount that you’re allowed to write off for that distance that you’ve driven.

How does it get from the phone to the managers at the office?

Really easy. You put in your records, time and expenses, into the app and the app will automatically sync with the cloud. It’s going to send those records back up to the cloud, to that shared database that you have. That’s all there is to it. Basically you have multiple engineers, you may have 10-20-50 engineers, techs on the road out there logging time. The app is going to send the time and expenses, the mileage, up to a shared database through the cloud and your manager will be able to write reports on that immediately.

That’s great. How do I get the apps?

You can get it from one of two places. You can either go out to the google play store or the apple store. You can download the apps for the phone. Or you can just go to our website stdtime.com. When you do you will see the android and iOS editions out there. You will also see the windows and web editions. Which would be incorporated into a larger enterprise scheme. Go out to stdtime.com download them all.

Do it today. Stdtime.com download both of the apps and Standard Time itself. You’re not going to regret it. Your 30 day trial, don’t worry once that expires because it’s super affordable after that. Go to stdtime.com for more information. And we’ll see you next time with more Standard Time.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm3Fvo9yPIs

Microsoft Project Integration

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Category: Blog

Published: Monday, 26 October 2015 13:53

Written by Ray White

You probably already know that Microsoft Project is the leader in project scheduling and planning.

But did you also know that the Standard Time® timesheet integrates with it?  That’s right!

It pulls down tasks… and sends back employee hours.

Imagine what you could do with these two together!

A project schedule without ‘actual work’ hours is stale and lifeless.

1. Tasks are static
2. Schedules don’t reflect actual employee work
3. Project managers don’t have a true picture

But imagine what your Microsoft Project schedule would look like with daily employee hours.  Everything would change.

Project managers would see the real situation on the ground, and make real-time changes as needed.

Isn’t that what you really want from your project schedule?

Click to try Standard Time with Microsoft Project!

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwcyyuKZv-0