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Timesheet Feature Review #2: Expense Reporting
If you have been visiting our blog regularly, you may have noticed that Software Shortlist recently published a list of 13 “must have” features for prospective timesheet buyers. Today, I’ll take a detailed look into the #2 most highly requested timesheet feature – expense reporting.
Any project worth its salt is bound to rack up expenses along the way, be it a training seminar for your workers or a software purchase for product development, almost every project will have its own miscellaneous costs to be recorded. However, how do you track these external expenses yet keep them separate from your actual billable time? Well, the answer lies in expense reporting features.
Exactly How Do Expense Reports Help Users?
e.g. timesheet expense reporting with Replicon (www.replicon.com)
Expense reports allow users to record miscellaneous expenses as separate from billable time. When creating your timesheets, expense reporting allows you to create a separate report just for the expenses incurred by the project/task. This streamlines the whole process and makes managing projects easier for project administrators and accountants. Both your timesheets and expense reports can be submitted together, making for regular and more accurate expense reports.
Timesheets are all about organization and accuracy. In order to maintain the perfect timesheet system, workers need to be able to enter reports that are easy to read and track. Expense reports allow workers to compartmentalize their costs and bills and in the process, create clear and concise reports for approval. Regular expense reporting also makes for more accurate billing as workers do not have to work back from memory to ensure that all expenses are accounted for at the end of the project.
Manage Both Time And Expenses
Expense reports are also often submitted together with timesheets so that costs and bills can be processed at the same time. This ensures that project teams can apply for expense reimbursements and bill their clients all at the same time. Project managers also have a much easier time reviewing and approving the reports generated as they are able to easily check where the project funds are being used and see if the expenses incurred are reasonable.
Regular expense reports can also help projects receive reimbursement for their costs faster; this will definitely be invaluable to cash-strapped projects and ensures that projects can remain well-funded.
There aren’t really any good working alternatives for expense reporting; the only other ways to submit costs incurred would be to include them in the timesheet as billable time or to simply compile the expenses at the end of the project. As you might imagine, billing expenses as part of the timesheet is far from ideal as it becomes very difficult to distinguish between actual works done and “filler time” meant to cover expense costs. As for compiling expenses at the end of the project, this has its own complications and drawbacks as well, including accuracy concerns and accounts reliability.
What are the Drawbacks to Expense Reporting?
Ironically, the greatest strength of expense reports also turns out to be their biggest weakness. By submitting separate reports for billed time and expenses, it is a sure-fire way of creating numerous documents that may be difficult to keep track off. The fact that expense reports are submitted together with timesheets helps alleviate this problem but a good administrative system is a must in order for expense reports to reach their maximum potential.
Depending on the different personalities of your workers, expense reports can also turn into a cumbersome chore for your project teams. In most projects, expenses are compiled and filed at the end of the project, once all the work has been completed. Some workers may thus find creating expense reports on a regular basis to be unnecessary and troublesome. If there happens to be a system already in place to keep track of expense receipts, regular expense reporting becomes even more unnecessary.
In Conclusion
The ability to include expense reports together with timesheets is the second most requested feature by the users of Software Shortlist’s comparison service. You might thus be surprised to know that only 14 out of the 21 timesheet software reviewed by our software panel allow users to include expense reports together with their timesheets. Hopefully, this article has provided you with a better understanding of how expense reports work, why they are considered “must haves” amongst most users and also the possible drawbacks of adopting them.
Have Your Say
Now that you have a better idea of how expense reports work, why not tell us what you think of regular expense reporting? We’d love to hear from you regarding your preferred method to reporting expenses and why.
Stay tuned for more upcoming articles of the other top “must have” timesheet software features. Next time, we will be looking at the ability to distinguish between billable and non-billable work…
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Timesheet Feature Review #1: “Entering time in a weekly view”
In service firms and project-based organizations, timesheets plays an increasingly important role in helping people manage and control their various accounts and projects. Timesheet software offers the perfect way to keep tabs on multiple projects by generating clear and useful reports used to track the time and work done on any particular project, and can also streamline the billing and accounting process.
Software Shortlist recently published a list of 13 features that its search data suggested were the top “must-haves” for prospective timesheet buyers.
Today, I’ll take a detailed look at the #1 most requested timesheet feature – using a weekly view to enter time.
Entering Time in a Weekly View
There is probably nothing more important to the usability of timesheet software than the way(s) in which people enter their time into the system. Many timesheet systems offer multiple time entry methods, as company needs vary with the nature of their work, plus users often have different (strongly held) views about which is best.
Common time entry options (and a few examples of what they look like) include:
- Daily view: Enter time manually in a view that shows time entries for a single day against relevant projects or tasks, with space for explanatory comments
e.g. Daily Time Entry View with Clicktime (www.clicktime.com)
- Weekly view: Enter time manually in a grid-like format that shows an entire week at a glance, typically with projects or tasks as rows, and days on the top.
e.g. Weekly Time Entry View with Replicon (www.replicon.com)
- Stopwatch timer: Enter time by selecting a project or task and clicking “start” on a timer. When you have finished that work, you click “stop” and the time entry is automatically added to the system.
e.g. Desktop timer widget from Harvest (www.getharvest.com)
Why does entering time in a weekly view matter?
To put it simply, the weekly view makes entering your timesheets about 7 times easier. It allows you, at a glance, to see across an entire week and easily enter time against your projects without constantly having to cycle through multiple pages on the daily view.
It is particularly well suited to people who have regular activities or projects that run across many weeks. You can enter time against one project for the Monday, and then simply tab across to Tuesday, and so on. With only a handful of keyboard strokes, you’ve completed your timesheet …without having to wait for new pages to load. And since the list of projects / tasks is typically carried across to the next week, you usually don’t need to set up the grid again each week but instead just start entering time.
And if you’re someone who never quite gets around to entering your time each day (or you have staff like this!), you’ll find that the weekly view can help jog your memory. You can mentally work your way through the week, comparing and contrasting days, and entering time quickly so you meet that weekly timesheet submission deadline. Not ideal, perhaps, but very much a real world scenario.
What are some drawbacks of weekly timesheet entry?
The grid format doesn’t allow you to easily see or enter detailed comments about how time was spent on a given day. Some timesheet systems provide hover-text or pop-up windows while others have fields below the grid for this purpose, but the simple reality is that the weekly view is not as well suited to providing detailed explanatory notes on how your time was spent as the daily timesheet view.
Whether this matters or not depends on the type of work you do and the expectations of whoever is approving your timesheet (e.g. boss or client). Some people prefer to enter the time in a weekly view first, and then go back and enter detailed notes on a daily view afterwards. Others prefer to enter time and notes simultaneously on a daily view.
The other key issue with a weekly view for time entry is about accuracy: it encourages you to enter time on a weekly basis and therefore your entries are only as good as your memory, and entries are often rounded to the nearest increment (e.g. 15 minutes or half an hour). This results in over- or under-billing, depending on the personality of your staff.
Timesheets are more accurate if time is captured closer to when it was spent, such as using a stopwatch or completing timesheets on a daily basis. A stopwatch allows you to capture exact increments of time at the instant they are worked, but may accidentally be left running or not started in the first place. Daily timesheets provide a good middle-ground, but require the discipline of setting aside some time each day to fill them in.
In Conclusion
The weekly view for entering timesheets is the single most popular “must have” feature requested by users of Software Shortlist’s timesheet comparison service. After reading this article, hopefully you now have a better understanding of the weekly timesheet method for entering time, why it is so popular, and the trade-offs involved in its use.
Why not join in the conversation and let us know which method you prefer for entering time on your timesheet system and why?
Stay tuned for more reviews of the other top “must-have” timesheet software features…
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Email marketing usage by SMBs
Some recent research on the marketing practices of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) indicates that email marketing is one of the top 3 marketing tactics they employ, and is set to grow strongly in 2011.
Of the 751 respondents to the survey (conducted by Zoomerang and GrowBiz Media) around 48% of business used email marketing in 2010. This places it equal third with print advertising, behind only direct mail and website in terms of widespread use.
Cost-effective marketing via email
With SMBs often operating on small marketing budgets (55% have less than $1k, a further 20% between $1k and $10k), it seems that the affordability and measurability of email marketing is hard to go past. In fact, 15% of businesses intend to increase their spend on email marketing in 2011, and only 3% intend to decrease it.
Software Shortlist’s own research into email service providers gives further evidence for its cost-effectiveness. In fact, the very best email marketing solutions for SMBs are among the most affordable, with the three products that were awarded 5 stars by our independent reviewers having an average cost of only $31 per month.
Reviews can be useful in understanding the pros and the cons of particular solutions, but remember it’s important you dig deeper and make a considered decision about which software is best for the specific requirements of your business.
Looking to get started with email marketing in 2011?
If you’re a small to mid-sized business looking to start email marketing in 2011 (or upgrade your existing email marketing efforts), there are many low cost yet powerful online email marketing solutions that can make it easy to get started. To get familiar with your *many* options, see this email marketing software directory.
To narrow this long list of software down to a shortlist quickly, you may like to consider the following free options from Software Shortlist:
