What to Look for in Timesheet Software: Crew Time & Equipment

If you need to track crews, equipment, or expenses, then watch this episode to find out why it’s important to have time and expense tracking software with these capabilities.

Things that you’re looking for your timesheet vendor to provide to you. Number three: crew-based time entry. In other words, you want to be able to have a system where you can enter the time easily for five employees who are off on some job site somewhere, they don’t have access to your systems, or maybe they don’t know how to use computers, they don’t do computers, they don’t have their mobile phone ready to go, or whatever it is. Crew-based time entry. And then you wanna have an easy method of approval for that time data also so you get those guys paid and so you can get their project accounting data and their billing data into the system, because that’s powerful stuff to have.

Checklist item number four for what you’re looking for in a time tracking system: equipment usage. As long as you’re tracking time, and a guy’s in there, or a lady is in there, entering their time data, they might as well tell you what equipment they’ve been using. Have they been using the truck, or the dolly, or the…whatever the equipment is in your business that’s useful, and you wanna understand the cost for using that equipment. You need to know which projects that equipment is being applied to. You need a time system that’s more than a time system, it’s collecting other data about the work that people are doing and what equipment are they using. So, equipment tracking.

Checklist item number five, cinco, cinq. That was French. But in Texas everybody speaks Spanish.

Checklist item number five: expenses. As long as you’re in there tracking your time, it’s nice to have the same system where you’re tracking expenses. Expenses for, say, travel. Hotel, automobile usage, mileage, airplane tickets, meals, all that kind of stuff. Is it on a credit card provided by your company or a credit card provided by the employee? Can you upload credit card receipts, can you take pictures and images of things and upload those into the system? Does this all work on a cell phone, on a smart phone? That’s something you want to be looking for when you’re looking for a time entry system.