Benefits of a State of the Art Weekly Timesheet

The practice of using attendance systems or time clocks dates back to the early nineteenth century. The industrial revolution paved the way for numerous innovations and indeed shaped the world we live in today. A time clock or an attendance system is an obvious byproduct of the era. It was a basic need for mill owners and factory supervisors to keep a tab on the time of entry and exit of every laborer. The time clock, which later came to be referred to as time card by laborers was more importantly an attendance system. It was not a daily or weekly timesheet.

Attendance systems such as time clocks have been replaced by a myriad of solutions over the years. The latest being the biometric timekeeping. Some modern offices have a biometric attendance system that works with an identity card having the necessary barcode or radio frequency id. Many biometric systems have fingerprint scanners or even retina scanners in high security facilities. These systems or the humble attendance register with an in-time and out-time can keep a record of entry, exit and presence. However, these don’t have any bearing on how many hours one has actually worked. The highly competitive era we live in demands venturing beyond the simple attendance or the in-time and out-time. That is why a state of the art daily or weekly timesheet is important.

Benefits of a Daily or Weekly Timesheet

For Individual Employees

An hourly, daily or weekly timesheet will offer a simplified overview and an extensive report for both users or employees and supervisors or administrators. Every employee using a weekly timesheet will be able to assess the time they have put in, neatly classified according to the tasks they had been assigned. Not every workflow moves in a linear fashion and every project doesn’t have the same approach. While users or individual employees will know how their weekly work hours have been spent, the more extensive version of the collective report will be available for administrators.

For Supervisors and Administrators

Supervisors or managers will be able to assess time entries, they can check approved activities and time spent on unapproved tasks and the entire administration module can be used to get a fairer understanding of any loss of time that may have been incurred. A weekly timesheet allows segregated individual assessment and comparative collective assessment. An administrator, supervisor or manager can compare the timesheets of different users. Tasks performed in every category as per the key responsibilities of an individual employee, the efficiency or speed at which the task has been accomplished, which projects a particular individual has worked on and how every project assigned to that person has progressed over the week can be easily assessed. These factual assessments will help administrators to make informed decisions. Strategies are developed on the basis of tactics and the latter is inapt without attending to the minutest detail.

Exportable Tabular / Graphical Representation of Data

Anyone who has worked with analog attendance systems and has manually computed data from various sources knows how painstakingly tedious the whole process can be. There is room for error and the eventual result is hardly an interesting representation of data. A state of the art weekly timesheet solution will attend to tabular and graphical representation of data. There will be easy to use graphs or tables with simple highlights that can be used for reference, assessment and even presentation. Users and administrators, owners and clients will have a pleasant time working with the visual representations. Also, the reports generated are exportable. One doesn’t have to be confined to the weekly timesheet software or interface. The add-in working in tandem with the Outlook Calendar can be exported to a spreadsheet or any other system such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Thereon the reports can be used by every department and personnel authorized to deal with such data.

Weekly Review with a Weekly Timesheet

Some companies usually conduct monthly reviews. Many businesses don’t review staff performance until a quarter or even half a year. This is not the era of yearly or half yearly reviews. A weekly review is sometimes necessary and even daily review may be desirable in some industries. A software solution that can provide you with a weekly timesheet overview facilitates this weekly review.

The right time reporting solution will allow you to report time on every hour of the day, via your Outlook calendar, which can then help give you a daily, monthly or weekly timesheet overview (or even for other periods as well).