Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Contractor time tracking records hours against work rather than against a schedule. The distinction matters beyond bookkeeping: the IRS asks whether a business controls “or has the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job,” so a system that sets a contractor’s hours is itself a factor. And the rate at which a contractor stops being cheaper than an employee is $53.01, not the $32.82 an employee earns. > This is not legal or tax advice.

The timesheet approval process is the set of steps between an employee recording hours and those hours reaching payroll: submission, review, correction, approval and period close. The deadline is not chosen, it is counted backwards from pay date. The review is not a matter of diligence, it is a matter of how many hours the approver has.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency issues no timekeeping regulation. The requirements come from the contract: DFARS 252.242-7006(c)(9) and (c)(10) require a timekeeping system that identifies labor by cost objective and a labor distribution system that charges direct and indirect labor correctly. Everything else called a “DCAA requirement” is audit practice derived from those two criteria and from the FAR cost principles.

Law firms bill time in tenths of an hour: six minutes is 0.1. Each entry carries a matter number, a timekeeper, the time, and a description of the work. Firms acting for corporate clients and insurers add UTBMS task codes and submit invoices in the LEDES format. The ABA Model Rules require the fee to be reasonable and the basis for it to be communicated to the client — and say nothing at all about rounding, which is where most of the trouble starts.

Agency time tracking exists to answer one question: did the fee cover the work. A $12,000 monthly retainer at a $120 target rate funds 100 hours. Deliver 128 and the effective rate drops to $93.75, with 28 hours of over-servicing worth $3,360. Hours by client, by role and by activity are what turn a retainer into a margin number.

A “black hole” request is a ticket that gets escalated to engineering and then disappears. The agent can’t see progress, the developer can’t see the customer, and nobody tells the requester when it’s fixed. It usually happens because support and engineering live in two tools joined by copy-paste.

A project management dashboard shows the few numbers that tell you whether a project will finish on time and on budget. The core set is schedule variance, cost variance, the schedule and cost performance indexes, and a forecast of final cost. All four come from three inputs: the budget, the percentage of work actually complete, and the cost incurred to date.

Tracking project progress means producing one defensible number: the percentage of planned work actually finished. That number depends on the method used to credit partially finished work, and the choice changes the answer. A project with four of ten tasks done reads 40% under a 0/100 rule and 55% under a 50/50 rule — the same work, fifteen points apart.

Is it already the end of October? Wow. Time truly flies when our team is busy working on updates. This month, there are tons of useful improvements for everyone! You can now see what your resource bookings are worth with the new bookings-based revenue, and set up automated rules about time off and bookings. And that’s not all – from task dependencies in the project task list to subtasks in task bundles, there’s plenty more below.