Timesheets

Government Tax Credits

Many years ago, managers asked us to start filling in a Timesheet. They were adamant it wasn’t used to actually track what we were doing, and accepted we may inflate the actual hours to fill the working day e.g. we might have been chilling for 2 hours but then claim we did the full 7.5 hours on a project.

They implied it was to help them claim for some “UK Government Tax Credits” which was some kind of tax rebate for companies involved in “innovation“.

The thing is, I think 95% of our work is contractual so we have been given some requirements by our main customer, and we implement it. So it’s not driven by our own creativity in the hope that people want it. It is driven by the customer who already announced they will pay. Therefore, I think our claims were probably a tax scam. That’s my opinion though, and based on no legal understanding.

One day, I got an email from auditors KPMG. I wasn’t going to lie, so I told them it was simply making a few changes to allow the feature to work for a different country. Also, it got cancelled.

KPMG Audit

I am from the audit team at KPMG and have been given your contact details by the group finance team and have a couple of questions regarding work on a specific project in the year.

Group finance have recorded that you have spent 1/2 of your time in 2018 on the Scotland project. Could you please confirm this through answering the following questions:

1)  Please can you describe the nature of the project we have selected for testing? (i.e. is this project to do with maintaining existing software, or enhancing/building new software)

2)  What’s the status of the overall project? (i.e. how far from completion? / have any issues been encountered which you are struggling to resolve?)

3)  Does the attached percentage of your time appear an appropriate representation of the proportion of time you spent working on this project at this time?

4)  How do you record your time, and do you know how the percentages we’ve outlined to you are derived?

If you could send your response directly to me by the end of the day that would be great.

KPMG

I wonder what they did with my response telling them the project got cancelled. I also think the time spent wasn’t correct. In different years, I have known other people get contacted with wildly inaccurate times as well, so I have no idea how the times we enter in the timesheet somehow become completely different figures when reported by the Finance department.

New Timesheet Meeting

It was my understanding that the entire business (or at least anyone involved in software) filled in their timesheets. But then more recently, we were all asked to join a meeting about timesheets, and I was surprised at how many people were protesting about this “new policy“. Even people working on the same software as me said they hadn’t had to fill it in. So I had been filling it in for years after being told it was mandatory, but then it seems it wasn’t – depending on which team you were in.

There were quite a few companies we had acquired over the years which also hadn’t been asked to follow this process.

This is what we were told:

Purpose & importance of timesheets

• Resource plans only forecast the allocation of people and time. Timesheets provide actual and factual data which provide the following main areas of value to the company.
• The ability to improve our scheduling — we can use this data to better plan in the work we have for the department at a team and individual level.
• The ability to improve our forecasting — by reviewing Forecast vs. Actual time we become more knowledgeable and therefore accurate in our forecasting process, this improves our understanding of what and for how long our teams need on various items of work.
• The ability to understand what things cost — by understanding how much time is spent we can get a generalised view of how much the work we do costs. This is important for both budgeting and recognition of capitalised revenue – It also helps us know what to charge our customers where appropriate.
• The ability to understand if we are efficient — by understanding how much actual time is spent on various activities versus what was allocated we can get a view on what disrupts our plans, by how much and who is impacted. We can then use this data to mitigate this.
• Person specific salary information is not used to calculate cost; finance use a generalised role-based approach and the SFIA framework.

Discussion

We were told that “Contractors are not applicable for Timesheets“. Why? Surely this goes against all the reasons why they want to do timesheets, to estimate the time and money cost of projects and improve forecasting. If outsourcing isn’t logged, it gives a false impression.

Some people were asking questions like “What’s the maximum/minimum hours to be logged per day and per week?“. Is that them admitting they had no idea what their contracted hours were?

In similar fashion, you would get people who work part time asking questions such as: “I don’t work Fridays, do I need to log anything for that day?“

Also, in a similar fashion, some people wanted to admit they didn’t really do their contracted hours, but had to inflate it to overreport it. I suppose if they want to know how many days/weeks projects are taking, then recording how many hours you have been slacking does make sense:

“When I started recording timesheets in this system I was putting in less than my contracted hours, and then got a message saying the timesheets were incomplete. I now record all of my contracted hours. Let me know if this isn’t what you want.“

Then you had people with the opposite problem

Should we accurately record the number of hours worked, or should our timesheet always add up to 40 hours a week regardless of extra hours done?“

Some Tech Lead/Architect-type staff made a good point that since they work across projects and will help others when needed, they won’t have that “project task” on their timesheet because they haven’t been assigned to that project:

“I do a lot of work doing “consultancy” for projects that I’m not formally allocated to, so naturally those projects are not in my “Tasks” list. Am I expected to try and find project codes for each of these (and get allocated to those projects even for a bit of one-off help) or should I just use ‘BAU’ (Business as Usual) for that?”

Another architect said his work actually spanned multiple projects because he was working on something that is a prerequisite for both projects. So would that mean he just halves the time against 2 projects?

In a similar fashion, sometimes problems arise with some legacy system, and the experts in that field will have to investigate or even fix the issue. Does this then just go down as a generic “Out of scope” item? That sounds like something that is important to track.

Some people were moaning that they might already fill in some time against their assigned Bugs (which was their specific team’s decision), but now they have to also report the time into this central system.

I think there’s plenty of aspects that are open to interpretation or people’s preferences. I noticed we have a “Meeting” task, but when there’s a meeting about your project, then shouldn’t that just be logged as Project Work, and then Meetings should be for non-project meetings? Then sometimes we have optional meetings where someone is demoing their project, or another department is announcing some news. Is that a “Meeting” or is that “Out of Scope”, or if it is educational, should it go down as “Personal Development”?

So it seems the simple idea of creating a timesheet has loads of complexity that a lot of people haven’t considered. I suppose the answer comes down to what you actually want to measure and why?  

The manager’s response to the questions about “if the time needs to add up to your contracted hours” – was that “the time should be accurate and it shouldn’t just be ‘adding up to something!’”. But the system doesn’t really support that. There was a time where a teammate’s time was erratic and he was starting at 2pm and sometimes staying late, or sometimes doing extra time on different days. So instead of doing a consistent 7.5 hours a day, his timesheet looked more like 2, 7, 13, 7.5, 9.5 etc, and it got flagged up as being inaccurate.

This was a brilliant quote from a colleague:

“the only accurate timesheets are the ones when I am annual leave”

Someone came up with an interesting idea. Since many people will just slap 7.5 hours against their project across 5 days, and we all know the timesheets aren’t going to be accurate, can’t we just assume if someone is assigned to a project, they automatically get 7.5 hours assigned to it, unless they log tasks on the contrary e.g. out of scope work, sick leave, holiday? 

“No” was the answer because that’s not how the Time Sheet system is designed. It is a good idea though.

There was one guy called Jason who was constantly moaning. I’d seen him on other calls and he seemed quite problematic. I could imagine he is the sort of person that would get sacked at one point for his problematic and negative attitude. The manager leading the call somehow remained patient with him, and came out with this quote which was a great response considering how frustrated she must have felt:

“I can’t work miracles Jason….I am telling you how I can help you right now”

Manager

Sounds like a film-quote.