Timesheets and Health and Safety

Timesheets and Health and Safety – Understanding how they affect each other

In any work environment, maintaining a healthy standard can be quite challenging. Even trickier is managing office politics that keep emerging on a daily basis. While politics and disagreements are the perfect recipes for office disputes and disagreements, they can easily be dealt with by the use of a timesheet.

But how can timesheets help in promoting a healthy and safe working environment? It’s important to first consider the health and safety requirements in any working environment. Apart from injuries, issues such as disputes concerning financial differences and any other personal issues can be a big health challenge in a working place.

It’s for this reason that timesheets are of utter importance in managing such issues. How can they be used in managing health and safety? How do they relate? Read along to find out more.

Timesheets Improve Workers Productivity

Perhaps the best asset that any workplace can have is productive employees. Let’s face it, once you have employees who are motivated and energetic about what they do, you will ultimately have a productive business. This will translate to more output or profits at the end of the day.

Timesheets go a long way in ensuring that you have a healthy and productive workforce. A timesheet will track employees’ working hours from the time they step in to when they sign out. Even better, the timesheet will determine whether or not an employee completed the assigned task on the stipulated time.

Such system in a workplace goes a long way to tune the workers’ mindset in a healthy way. An employee will become more organized in meeting the required standards and deadlines of assigned tasks. This way, the timesheet will ensure that the employee is more productive in a healthy and safe way.

Timesheets Ensure Accurate Invoicing

As mentioned before, timesheets are important in the workplace, not because of health and safety hazards such as injuries, but mainly for promoting psychological health and safety of both the employer and employees.

If you are an employer, you can attest to the fact that one of the most difficult things to deal with is employee remuneration. If you don’t have an effective system in place, you can easily lose track of employee remuneration in relation to performance. In such a scenario, one sure thing is that; you are going to lose money and your working environment will be less safe and healthy.

So, how can you use timesheets to solve all this? One of the biggest advantages of a timesheet is that it’s able to track an employee’s working hours. This makes the process of invoicing quite easy and accurate. With timesheets in place, you will manage to avoid any workplace politics involving remuneration and eventually have a positive, healthy and safer work environment.

Enhanced Decision-making Process

As a proprietor or CEO of any business, you are tasked with making informed decisions on almost every matter. Your employees will be looking up to you to make critical decisions that dictate the way they work, get paid and overall health and safety decisions. These decisions can make or break a business. So how can you successfully make an informed decision on critical matters to do with health and safety?

Well, one of the ways is by using a timesheet. When your entire business is running on a timesheet, you can easily keep track of all activities undertaken by your employees. Although the tasks done by your employees may seem minute, they ultimately play an important role in your decision making process.

A timesheet will present you an accurate picture of how employees perform in your business. With such knowledge at your fingertips, you can easily make an informed decision that will ultimately improve their health and safety standards. This way, you will save a lot of time and money to investigate on issues that affect the performance, health and safety of your business. A timesheet and health and safety management system will provide you this information, thus enhancing your decision making process.

Timesheets, Health and Safety: In a Nutshell

For any business to make a profit, all its employees should be highly motivated while working in a healthy and safe environment. However, in order to run a successful working environment that is also safe and healthy to your employees, you will need the help of a formidable timesheet. This will go a long way in providing you with all the information you require to make your working arena healthy and safe.

Written by Guest Post

Holly Shaw

 

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Measuring Labor Cost and How it Relates to Increased Productivity Overtime

People provide their labor to businesses in exchange for wages, and they trade their unpaid leisure time for paid work time to make a living and to be able to purchase goods and services. Businesses, in turn, use this labor to produce goods and services demanded by consumers. Employers often use measuring labor cost in order to relate it back to the rate of production.

Economists divide the factors of production into four categories: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.

Second Factor of Production: Labor – Labor is the effort that people contribute to the production of goods and services. Your people are the most important assets in your business. They are also the assets that change most often and require the greatest amount of nurturing and development in order to deliver expected results. Effective workforce optimization depends on the right blend of training, performance standards, technology, and motivation.

Labor Types

Types of Labor to Measure

Unskilled and Semi-skilled Labor Unskilled laborers may lack the basic skills necessary for satisfactory workplace performance. This means someone in your organization must train them, supervise them closely or provide extensive on-the-job training to ensure work is performed as specified.

Salary & Hourly (Wage Employees) – Salaried and hourly wage labor are those employees whose compensation is in exchange for work done. Do you have an accurate picture of which projects or clients are getting the lion’s share of your employees’ hours? Not likely, unless you’re tracking in real-time to see where you’re getting bogged down, where you’re getting the most bang for your buck, and where you might need to allocate more resources.

Contract Labor  – Independent contractors, on-demand or self-employed workers, and freelancers are individuals who do work for you but are not your official employees. For businesses that rely on contractors, it’s important to know when they are working. Employers must track how many labor hours their contractors have put in, especially when these are government contracts. The DCAA has specific rules in place in order to pass an audit on any government contracting jobs. But even for non-government contracts, there are several reasons you might want to track how long, when, or even where your virtual team is working:

If you pay them by the hour, tracking contractor hours ensures you aren’t overpaying.

If you have contractors who bill by the hour, they need to know their billable labor hours to invoice accurately.

Knowing how contractors worked on a project helps you better estimate job costs so you can bid more accurately for similar jobs in the future.

In the case of government contractors, time tracking is required to meet DCAA compliance, among other regulations. Ensuring proper DCAA regulation accounting and time tracking compliance can prevent future issues in the case of an audit.


Defining Productivity In Relation To Labor Cost Percentage

Productivity is the number of goods and services that the labor force creates. Businesses measure productivity by how much gets produced by a certain amount of labor and a fixed amount of capital. The more they create, the higher their productivity. Companies seek ways to boost worker productivity because it increases their profit. High productivity creates a competitive advantage.

Productivity

Eliminating Calculation Errors Increases Productivity – When you process accurate time cards, you are better able to forecast your spends on labor and plan your job cost more effectively. Keeping Excel spreadsheets or pen-and-paper timesheets is definitely no longer the best way to manage your staff. With an intuitive cloud-based time tracking tool (like Hour Timesheet) you are able to manage employee and contractor job cost and absenteeism on the go when needed and create and process error-free payroll every time. You can then effectively perform an analysis of labor cost and a productivity analysis. You will see that that production cost goes down as you start to see productivity growth overall.

Understanding Data & Analytics Increases Productivity – Business analysis is an important part of running any company. Taking a look at your business resources and keeping good records of your employee time not only allows you to manage project and job costs, but it also allows you to forecast your unit labor costs better for future work.

Being able to pull up your labor data and analyze it to forecast real-time labor costs gives you a great starting point for planning and optimizing your budget.

Improving punctuality makes a difference, and having a way to monitor employee attendance habits keeps your team honest. It also provides a great way to perform employee reviews and audits. Having clear attendance data at your disposal allows you to plan better as well.


Bottom Line

Productivity doesn’t just increase your efficiency. If you do it right, it can also increase your income. True productivity isn’t about getting more things done. True production is about getting the right things done. More income for you means more charity for others, new jobs for others, and new products and services for others.

Let Hour Timesheet help your origination track your labor force and your productivity today

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What is a Leave Management System

What is a Leave Management System?

Leave Management Systems

A Leave management system is the process used to handle any kind of time off request and to track time that employees are away from work.

Leave management is one of the simplest yet crucial HR activities that often consumes a significant portion of the HR team’s time. To succeed as an organization, having a reliable leave management system is important.

Benefits of Automating Employee Leave

Leave management software can provide basic guidelines for establishing extended leave policies. The software can automatically keep track of the amount of time that employees are out of work and can report that information as needed or required.

Eliminating Excessive Paper Work – It is quite common to find organizations, managing employee leaves across a series of spreadsheets or even using partially paper-based systems. Therefore, accurately tracking and recording employee time off become a real hassle.

FLSA Compliance –  In cases such as employee’s persistent short term absence or long term illness, it is imperative that employee benefit compliances is adhered to.

Tracking leave pattern – It is very essential to track employee leave patterns to monitor the amount of paid leave, sick leaves and holiday patterns within your organization. .

Features Available in Automated Leave Management Systems

Management and tracking of leave requests

Management and tracking of leave on employee timesheet

Online Approvals

Leave balance and history access on timesheet

Leave integration with payroll

Detailed reports

History of leaves rejected, approved and requested

Research has shown that poor leave management practices may negatively affect employee performance. It can also affect employee morale and therefore impact project deliverables.

Job Costing & Hour Timesheet

What is cost accounting? What are its objectives?

Are you finding it difficult to manage your expenses? You might be well aware that to run a business successfully, it is important to know to control your expenses. For this purpose, it’s important you keep a record of all your operating costs. This is where cost accounting comes into the picture. If you are wondering, how cost accounting is beneficial for your business, then you need to continue reading about Hour Timesheet; the perfect fit for companies looking for timekeeping software for cost accounting

Modern methods of cost accounting first emerged in the manufacturing industries, though its advantages helped it spread quickly to other sectors. For many firms, cost accounting helps create and measure business strategy in a more organic way.

Cost accounting is distinct and separate from general financial accounting, which is regulated by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and is critical for creating financial statements. Instead, cost accounting aims to report, analyze and lead to the improvement of inter-business cost control and efficiency. Cost accounting is a system of operational analysis for management.

Cost Accounting Defined

Cost Accountancy is the process of accounting for cost. It begins with the recording of expenditure and ends with the preparation of statistical data. Cost Accounting is a formal mechanism of ascertaining and controlling the costs of products or services.

It is thus helpful to the management in decision making which also requires the costing information. However, if a firm keeps cost and financial accounts separately then their reconciliation is also necessary so as to verify the accuracy of both sets of accounts.

Cost accounting is also used for control purposes and guidance to management. It involves the ascertainment of the cost of every job, order, product, process or service.

Objectives of Cost Accounting

Determination of Cost

Basis for fixing selling prices

Cost Control

Cost Reduction

Identifies and eliminates wastes like material, expenses, equipment, tools and so forth.

Ensures optimum utilization of resources

To correctly analyze the cost of both the process and operations.

Determination of the profitability of each of the products and help management in the maximization of these profits.

Help in the preparation of budgets and implementation of budgetary control.

Aid management in the formulation and implementation of incentive bonus plans on the basis of productivity and cost savings.

Functions of Cost Accounting

Bookkeeping – Bookkeeping involves recording of cost according to pre-arranged or predetermined classification.

Cost Control – The cost control is exercised through cost collection, cost analysis, cost presentation and cost interpretation.

Cost Analysis – Cost Analysis deals with determination of different relationship between cost and various determinants of costs.

Cost Comparison – The cost of alternative products, activities, methods or areas is compared in the field of production or distribution.

Cost Planning – Cost planning involves the accounting of all costs in the records in a proper manner.

Cost Finding – Cost finding is the measurement or estimation of different products, departments or other segments of the company’s operations.

Summary

In every business, pre-planning your business strategy is crucial. Without a proper idea of the financial state of the organization, the business strategy is incomplete. When you are aware of the costs, you know where the profit margin is lacking. It becomes easier to eliminate the extra cost being incurred and make a better business finance strategy. Also, cost accounting helps you to keep an eye on the increasing costs. If the cost of raw materials is increasing annually, then it allows companies to decide a future course of action to reduce or control the increasing costs. For this purpose, a firm may consider approaching other vendors or decide to manufacture the raw materials themselves. Accordingly, the management can decide on future strategies for the company.

Let Hour Timesheet help you with capturing your job cost today. Try free for 30-days. No credit card required.

DCAA Compliance With QB Software

Features To Look For In DCAA Compliant Time Tracking Software

Government contractors that are hoping to get awarded projects from the government have to comply with the regulations set in place by the DCAA. The Defense Contract Audit Agency outlines exactly how businesses should be tracking their time and documenting accounting when working on a government project. The DCAA will audit companies, and ensure they are following these guidelines. The DCAA compliant timekeeping procedures can be tricky to navigate, which is why Hour Timesheet has compiled a DCAA compliance checklist. This makes it easy to prepare for an audit, and make sure your company is in line with DCAA regulations.

DCAA Compliance and Time Tracking

Let’s say you’re looking for a long-term solution to DCAA compliance. Time tracking is a big part of many businesses, and adding in DCAA compliance makes the process lengthy and tiresome. Luckily, companies like Hour Timesheet exist to make it easy for businesses. You don’t have to worry if your time tracking meets DCAA requirements, because we’ve already done it for you. Even if you’re already using QuickBooks, and you’re just looking for some extra help – Hour Timesheet can integrate directly with QuickBooks.

What type of firm needs time tracking software? Most employers who hire hourly employees need to know the number of hours each employee has worked so that payroll can be calculated properly. Government contractors have a different set of rules and are required to track time, both hours for exempt and non-exempt employees. They also have certain rules in place involving tracking indirect costs, such as labor costs. Even organizations that only hire salaried employees have a need to track projects or tasks for successful project management. That’s why finding the right time and attendance software is critical to your bottom line.

What to Look for When Evaluating a DCAA Compliant Timekeeping Software? When researching tools, it’s important to make sure the software that you are evaluating meets certain criteria. Whether you’re an organization with salaried employees, or government contractors hoping to win a government contract, it’s important to partner with companies you can trust. Here are some things to look for when searching for a timekeeping system:

Reminders to Track Time Daily

It’s common for employees and contractors to forget to track time, which can cause a lot of issues for DCAA audit trails. Hour Timesheet offers daily reminders to track time and ensure it’s getting done accurately.

Online Approvals

Whether it’s approvals for time log edits or approvals for charge codes, it’s important to have a timekeeping system that allows approvals online.

Mobile Access (iOS and Google Play)

Managers can access Hour Timesheet from any computer, or through the mobile app, and submit approvals online.

Detailed Audit Log and Audit Trail

Whenever the DCAA performs an audit on your company, they’re going to want to see records of everything. The best practice when hoping to win future contracts is to keep detailed records and trails of all time, labor, and cost history. This will make it easier for you and the DCAA when the time comes for an audit.

Real-Time Location Tracking

Government contractors often perform work offsite and on the location of clients or at work sites. This can make time tracking difficult when managers are unsure where workers actually are. Hour Timesheet offers real-time, accurate location tracking so that your records can be as accurate as possible.

Integration with Accounting Software (QuickBooks Online & QuickBooks Desktop)

This is arguably one of the most important features in time tracking software. The DCAA not only wants to audit the company’s timekeeping requirements, but they also want to do an accounting system audit and ensure those records are accurate. By connecting your timekeeping software to your accounting system, such as QuickBooks, you’re making this process seamless. The DCAA will look at things like labor distribution, cost objectives, indirect costs and direct costs, and uncompensated overtime. Everything needs to be tracked to ensure proper DCAA compliance with QuickBooks.

Knowledge of Government Contracting

At Hour Timesheet, we believe the most important thing to look for in a timekeeping system is a demonstrated knowledge about the DCAA system. Without this knowledge, the software may not be able to provide what it promises. It’s important to work with a company that has an in-depth understanding of how the federal government awards contracts, audits companies and enforces DCAA regulations.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Some other features that can be very beneficial in a timekeeping system include an online web clock, correction timesheet workflows, and online job tracking. These make it easier for everyone involved to do their job.


Are you wasting time and money on the following?

Correcting math errors on hours worked and other time entry activities

Tracking down late or missing weekly timesheets

Manually entering employee time worked into your accounting and/or payroll file

    If you answered yes to any of the questions above, it’s time to let today’s technology work for you. Intuit and QuickBooks have a marketplace where 3rd party vendors who offer time tracking are listed. Only companies that pass strict guidelines and follow Intuit’s partner policies are listed on these sites.

    View QuickBooks Online Marketplace Apps here

    View QuickBooks Desktop Marketplace Apps here

    Hour Timesheet was created for you; with your origination in mind. We have created a simplified solution that captures your complex situations and makes DCAA compliance easy. Give us a try FREE for 30 days. No credit card is required. Our experts with over 20 years of industry experience are waiting to hear from you now. Hour Timesheet includes a QuickBooks timesheet import sync that makes your payroll process a snap!

    Hour Timesheet can be a perfect tool that will integrate & sync with your QuickBooks Desktop Hosting keeping an eye on your reminders, daily tasks, etc. Learn more about add-ons like Office 365 E3 suite for improving your team collaboration.

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