Why Timesheets and Timecards Are More Complex (and Important) Than You May Think

The US economy incurs more than $7.4 billion in losses every day due to untracked work hours. If there’s confusion over how employees are spending their workday and how much time a particular project’s taking, it’s nearly impossible to fine-tune miscalculations, potential time theft, or any other inaccuracies.

Since efficient time tracking is critical for construction payroll and compliance, it’s

essential to unearth the complexity and importance of maintaining accurate timesheets and timecards.

First Off, Why Is Time Tracking Important in the Construction Industry?

Timesheets provide the necessary support to process the payroll efficiently. They also help keep track of productivity through focused visibility into job progress. To that extent, they also help drive data-driven decisions about future staffing, project schedules, and cost allocations. So, when timesheets and timecards are maintained well, construction companies can ensure accurate pay for the right working hours and make better plans too (expand here).

In a nutshell, a timesheet boosts the real-time field collaboration that helps in reducing expenses, increasing employee productivity, and enhancing project efficiency.

Benefits of Using Timesheet (? Every company uses timesheets. What do you really mean here?)

• Provide all the information for effective payroll processing
• Calculate billable hours for clients
• Reduce the cost of billing and the number of working hours to perform the task (how? )
• Effective tracking of employee productivity and performance
• Easier to calculate future project costs

Unearthing the Timesheet, Timecard Complexity

The construction industry has an extensive workforce, works through complex compensation processes, and deals with a myriad of legal requirements, compliance , and regulations. Here are some challenges that surface on the timesheet front:

• Compliance issues: It isn’t easy to manually manage and update employee working hours and payroll reporting formats. That way, the problem could creep up and lead to FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) violations. Besides, there’s a need to comply with Davis-Bacon Act. When construction companies do not abide by the Davis-Bacon clauses, it can lead to heavy fines, imprisonment, or blocking from future federal construction projects.
• Reporting: The WH-347 report must be submitted weekly to the government, which can be cumbersome due to the manual preparation of the form.
• Calculation of shift differential pay: The pay rate varies based on the employee shifts. It is challenging to keep the right track of the differential pay details of every employee.
• Sync between timecards, payroll, and billing: Keeping a proper synchronization between varied construction activities is important but challenging. This is where an integrated ERP solution can help businesses track employees’ working hours and seamlessly integrate the related time cards with the payroll and billing system.
• Payroll models: A construction business needs to maintain the payroll records per different payroll frameworks. Moreover, different schedules – daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly – require proper maintenance of legal audit records and compliance reports.

Such intricacies and complexity can pose a challenge in timesheet maintenance. A business may try its best to deal with the issue for a long time and still fail to come up with an effective solution. So, it’s critical to redefine timesheets and timecards and liberate them from the shackles of utter complexity.

Also Read: Is Payroll Complexity in The Construction Sector Underrated?

Modern Timesheet and Construction Payroll Are Here to the Rescue

Undoubtedly, timesheets and timecards are extremely important. Still, it can be tedious to account for every minute of the working day, and it can be a monotonous job for employees to log their time at work every day manually.

Thankfully, the simple timecards with “punch in” and “punch out” options can now be replaced with automated time tracking and payroll management system. This modern system facilitates:

• Seamless asset tracking and timekeeping
• Compliance with the US labor laws
• Integration with payroll and project management systems
• Automatic calculation of prevailing wages, etc.

As a matter of fact, the new-age construction companies are using cloud-based timesheet and payroll solutions to automate key functions and free employees up for other critical tasks at hand.  Keeping timesheets on the cloud keeps mistakes down since no paper is shuffling back forth.

Get a Reliable Timesheet and Payroll Solution That Works for You

Now that you know that tracking the time of employees, processing payroll, creating automatic invoices, and syncing with accounting activities are very important in the construction business, it is time to get started with a robust ERP solution.

That’s because it can provide key employee information, send invoices, track payments, fulfill contractual obligations, accurately maintain books and records, provide reliable reports on your financial results, and much more.

Schedule a DEMO to see for yourself how much money and time you can save with our integrated solution.