Why is tracking time in construction so important

Amazingly 61% of projects are behind schedule and more than half of those are over budget on hours. This problem can ruin a company’s ability to make a profit and longer term send a company in the wrong direction.

In construction, there are generally two main things considered when bidding on jobs: Time (labor required) and materials. If you have a project and you bid 100 hours to perform a task then it’s critical that you know how much time was spent. Was it 150 hours or did you get it done in 75 hours. Either way, that information is valuable for future bidding. Even better is when you catch time overruns during the project. This allows you to get things back on track and try to squeak out a profit.

In this blog post, we discuss the reasons it’s important but also how to easily manage time tracking so that it’s useful information your business can use.

What is Time Tracking?

Time tracking is the keeping track of how many hours are spent on a particular project and/or task. In construction, there are various cost codes (CSI Codes) used to create buckets of funds for each trade or task. Time tracking is the function of capturing that time for that task so that it can be compared to what was estimated.

Why is Time Tracking Important?

Without tracking time to a task or job, you would have no way to jobcost a project and know how much money you made or lost. If you use cost codes, you can see how much time was spent doing specific tasks. This allows for better estimating in the future and for measuring production for the crews. Without time tracking, a construction business is driving blind without any way to know what is working and what is not working.

Beyond job costing, it’s important to have accurate timesheets for payroll. This can be done manually or with a phone app like BuildCenter. Accurate timesheets that represent what the hours the employee worked signed with all the relevant information is critical for labor law compliance as well as workers compensation audits. Check out our free 4A Timesheet Framework to ensure you are meeting the requirements.

3 Ways to track time

1) Manual paper timesheets

Many construction companies still use paper timesheets that workers fill out and turn in. This is a simple enough way to track time if the worker notes the project(s) and cost codes they worked on each day. The downside is that most workers simply wait until the end of the week and fill it out all at once. This makes it almost impossible to recall how much time was spent doing different tasks so the information becomes inaccurate and worthless from a cost code tracking perspective. The other downside is that timesheets can be messy and hard to read causing lost time for calls to workers to complete payroll. If you prefer the paper system, download our free timesheet template and customize it to your needs.

2) Spreadsheets

One step up from paper timesheets is to offer an online timesheet like google sheets or a spreadsheet. This helps with the readability of the timesheet but it still takes discipline by the workers to fill it out each day. Since spreadsheets are not easy to access in the field sometimes, this can be a challenge. Try our free online timesheet template

3) Phone App

The ultimate way to track time is with a phone app. The phone turns into a digital time clock and allows workers to clock in and out. They can switch jobs and even enter cost codes with a few taps on the phone. The GPS stamps also provide accountability for workers to only clock in and out at the job sites. BuildCenter is an app that was created for this purpose and was designed for construction workers.

What time should be tracked

There are different schools of thought on if you should track project management hours or other salaried positions. Those hours could be considered overhead and not be part of job costing. In our company we track all hours regardless of position. We budget for PM time and Supervision time and we want to know if we were over or under on those line items. If we didn’t track it, we would never know.

You should decide how accurate you want to be with job costing which will then answer the question of should you track management hours for jobs.

Summary

No matter what size construction company you operate, time tracking is critical to many aspects of your business. It will help with job costing and with compliance issues and audits. If you haven’t started tracking time, it may be time to start looking into it.
Try BuildCenter today to see how it can elevate your construction business.

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