DO YOUR TIMESHEETS!!!!!

BY ralph reefke
2011/03/23

It’s a very simple rule of business. To get paid, agencies have to invoice their clients for the hours they have worked. To know how many hours to invoice, the people doing the work have to enter their hours into some sort of time tracking system. Agency invoices client, client pays invoice, agency has the money to pay their employees. So, knowing this, why is it so hard to get everyone to do their timesheets? I have seen many tactics employed that attempt to get people into the habit of doing them… timesheet entry has been decreed by the almighty maker who will smite you dead if you don’t do them promptly, guilt and shame on you I mean really do you want us to go out of business, if we stress how important this is to our business people will just naturally want to do them, how about we remind you five times daily, ten times on the day they are due, DO YOUR TIMESHEETS!!!!!

Here at Dashboard timesheets are a serious matter and we have devised a creative incentive that really motivates people to do them…


(See the full set on our flickr)

Ha! I can honestly say that I am pretty good at doing my timesheets :-)

The real story is even better. A few of us Dashboardians were at an after work function and while conversing with Barry I mentioned that I was going to get my haircut on the weekend. I said that I would be getting it cut really short on account of I don’t like having to book appointments all the time. Hearing this, Barry made me a proposition. “If you let me shave your head I’ll give you $100″… “Only $100?”… “OK, $500, but the money has to go to charity”. And so we crafted this clever scenario to remind people to do their timesheets. I got a free haircut and the St. Albans Boys and Girls Club received $1000 from Mr. Barry Hillier. $500 for his trouble, and an additional $500 fulfilling a post he put out to increase our twitter following.

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  • 23/03/11

    Lee De Freitas says:

    As a finance person I am in total support of corporal punishment as a consequence of not doing your timesheets. Hey Ralph be grateful it wasn't a Brazilian.
  • 17/09/12

    Pooja says:

    Hi Colin,Thank you for mentioning my books in your post (although in your first snteence, the 8-step process is actually laid out in Implementing Value Pricing, not the Pricing on Purpose book).I am not alright with a firm keeping timesheets. Timesheets are the real cancer in law firms; the billable hour is just a symptom. Timesheets keep lawyers mired in the mentality that they sell time. They do not help you price better! If that was the case, lawyers and CPAs would be expert pricers, and they are not, since they've been recording time for nearly 100 years.Only understanding customer value increases your pricing competency. Timesheets have nothing to do with external value as perceived by the customer.So, no, you don't need to keep timesheets. And there are well over a thousand firms across all professional sectors that have gotten rid of them. This is an empirical question, and it amazes how many consultants ignore this evidence. We have personally helped many firms replace their timesheets, and not one has gone back.My book destroys, empirically, each of the four defenses raised for keeping timesheets (pricing, project management, productivity, and cost accounting). There are superior ways to do everyone of these tasks, and timesheets are not needed for any of them. I would think people would be thrilled to learn a superior way for knowledge workers to work, but apparently, old habits die hard.The evidence is out there, and I wish the consultants would stop arguing that timesheets are a necessity when they clearly are not. Regards,Ron Baker, FounderVeraSage Institute