Does Your Timecard Work for You?

Design Your Timecard to Help You Make More Money

The main purpose of construction field crew timecards is to keep track of employee hours so you can pay them properly for the hours they work. Right? Not entirely true. If you also want to know and track accurate job costs, your timecard can become an important business tool to make you more money. To make this happen, you need to design your timecard to reflect how you do business and match what you want to keep track of.

Designed properly, your timecard can become an invaluable tool to track labor production, field quantities installed, company and rental equipment usage, and materials consumed on the job. And then, after gathering the information available from daily and weekly timecards, you can create a production tracking system to give your field foremen and superintendents updated job cost data so they will know how well they’re doing every week on their projects. To design an integrated timecard to work for you, get your estimator, project manager, and foreman together to determine which work task cost codes you want to keep track of.

When you bid a job, the estimator calculates exact quantities of work for each part of your scope of work. For example, to bid a new concrete slab warehouse floor, the estimator ‘takes-off’ the amount of labor, materials, and equipment to form the slab edge, place concrete material, finish the slab, and then strip the forms and cleanup. Each of these operations requires a bid estimate of crew production hours required to perform each task. Your timecard cost code categories must therefore match how you estimate and bid in order to keep track and know actual hours required to do different parts of the job.

By observing the example time card, you will notice how the work is broken down exactly as the estimator bid the job. By having the codes match the timecard, the estimator can then calculate the number of hours required to perform each task after project completion and see if their production rates are accurate and match how they price future projects.

TIMECARD - Concrete Slab		Employee Name: Joe Super						Project: Ace Warehouse
		Hours						Crew Weekly Quantity
Cost Code	Work Description	M	T	W	T	F	Total
3401	Form Concrete Slab	8	8	8				600 LF
3402	Place Concrete				8			370 CY
3403	Finish Slab							20,000 SF
3404	Strip Forms & Clean					8		20,000 SF
Total Hours		8	8	8	8	8	40
Company Equipment
3451	Pickup Truck # 101	8	8	8	8	8	40
3452	Generator	8	8	8	8		32
Rental Equipment
3601	Concrete Pump					8	8
Materials
3801	Form Lumber							650 LF
3851	Concrete							370 CY
3861	Curing Compound							50 Gallons

When team leaders know what they are trying to accomplish, it makes it a lot easier to hit their targets. In order to give your foreman something to shoot for, they must know the quantities they are trying to hit and get a weekly update of how well they are doing. Before the job starts, the estimator should get together with the project manager and foreman to review the bid and quantities allocated to perform the entire job. The foreman then will have a budget to aim at. To keep track of how well the crew is doing versus the job estimate and budget, make sure your foreman records the quantities installed every week as noted on the timecard. This way, the foreman and project manager can review the progress weekly to see if they are staying on budget.

Estimators also calculate the number of equipment hours required to build projects. The timecard can also be used to efficiently track company equipment and rental equipment usage. Set up your timecard to include a listing of all of your equipment. Have the foreman record which equipment is used on the daily timecard. Your accounting manager can then job charge your equipment weekly to the correct jobs based on where it was used. At the end of the job, you can then review the estimate of equipment usage versus the actual hours spent on the projects. Your foreman and project manager can also monitor the budget versus actual for equipment if given updated numbers every week. You can also design your timecard to track the materials used weekly on the jobsite. Have the foreman record what materials were installed or delivered to the job as shown.

Weekly FIELD PROGRESS TRACKING REPORT
Project: Ace Warehouse			Date: Week Ending March 1
Cost Code	Work Description	Budget Quantity	Actual Progress	Budget Labor	Labor Actual
3401	Form Concrete Slab	1,200 LF	600 LF   50%	120 Hrs.	70 Hrs.    58%
3402	Place Concrete	740 CY	370 CY   50%	96 Hrs.	48 Hrs.    50%
3403	Finish Slab	40,000 SF	20,000 SF   50%	80 Hrs.	40 Hrs.    50%
3404	Strip Forms & Clean	40,000 SF	10,000 SF   25%	64 Hrs.	16 Hrs.    50%

At the end of each weekly pay period, add up the number of hours spent in each cost code work item and compare it to the job budget. Review these numbers with your field foreman every Monday morning to make sure they know where they are and what they have to do to keep their job on budget. Your estimator is the best person to prepare this weekly recap as they clearly understand the cost codes and job budgets. Plus, they will be the first to discover if their estimate is correct or if there are job cost overruns. Note, on the example, the ‘Form Concrete Slab’ hours are over-budget as of the date of this report. By knowing this early on, the field team can make immediate adjustments to bring the job in on-budget.

Knowing where you are is easy if you setup your timecard properly. Have your foreman turn in every field employee’s timecard daily to maintain accuracy. Keep your costs updated every week and make sure your foreman knows if their job is on-budget or not. This will help you make more money.