Time Tracking for the Utilities Sector

Cost Allocation and Budget Control

Your business is highly labor intensive, and you need to track billable vs non-billable hours, contract costs, and capital vs. operational expenditures. Here’s how time tracking helps with cost allocation and budget control:

Allocate labor costs to specific projects, jobs, or asset types (e.g., line inspections/repairs, water quality testing, wind turbine maintenance)
Track whether labor costs should be expensed or capitalized, aligning with GAAP, IFRS, and USofA accounting rules
Capture detailed labor costs by job/activity/location, including overtime and other exceptions pay
Support budget forecasting by analyzing historical time data for work associated with projects, jobs, specific assets, etc.

Workforce Optimization and Productivity

With multiple teams required to perform day-to-day operations, inspections, and maintenance, you need the ability to assign work effectively to reduce inefficiencies and downtime, all while possibly working far-afield from other resources on a given project, job, or asset. A good time tracking system will allow you to:

Track workforce utilization rates to help you identify bottlenecks and idle time for your team members
Provide shift management, safety time, and overtime tracking, preventing resource shortage delays
Support wage law compliance by location including changes in jurisdiction depending upon where the work is performed
Compare time spent on planned vs unplanned operations, inspections, and maintenance to improve process efficiency

Regulatory Compliance and Audits

Time tracking can help you confirm workforce utilization compliance for the regulatory bodies you need to report to.

Provide real-time documentation of detailed labor activities, supporting compliance for inspection and maintenance schedules
Easily customize audit-ready reports linking your workforce to regulatory-mandated activities (e.g.wastewater treatment, water quality testing, NESC compliance)
Help you pass compliance audits faster by showing records of who performed inspections and maintenance and when those activities were performed
Ensure that employees are tracking time (e.g., accruing overtime and/or safety time, taking required breaks) to help you comply with state and local wage laws

Contractor and Field Workforce Management

Workers in the field, whether full-time employees or specialized contractors, have special requirements to make sure they are able to track time easily and accurately across numerous and dispersed job sites.

Track time from any location with robust mobile apps to capture job start/stop, location, equipment involved, related expenses, etc.
Use mobile devices to capture supporting evidence (e.g., documents, pictures, notes) for work completed
Validate time entry for specific job sites/ locations or individual jobs based on location (e.g. create geo-fences for a worker’s job site locations)
Manage jobs and work orders as they are created and assigned to workers, all while tying them back to project cost accounting for financial reporting

Risk Management and Incident Response

Your teams help you prevent catastrophic failures, whether natural gas leakages, outages, transformer explosions, water contamination, etc. In the case of an incident, however, you need to provide a detailed timeline of related work efforts for legal, insurance, and regulatory investigation purposes. Implementing a robust time tracking system allows you to:

Quickly and easily document who was working on a specific asset before an incident occurred, aiding in forensic investigations
Document evidence of compliance with safety protocols to reduce your liability in post-incident legal cases
Provide a historical log of workforce activities to support the root cause analysis and minimize future risks