From paper timesheets to electronic entry: what it takes

What paper really costs

The bill is not the price of the slips but the work that follows them. The hours are collected, interpreted, typed into a spreadsheet and moved on to payroll and invoicing. Even in a small company this easily takes a day a month, and that day is done in the evenings. On top of that, work nobody remembered to record regularly goes uninvoiced.

Three points where the error arises

The first is the moment of entry: the slip is filled in days later from memory. The second is interpretation: whose handwriting, which site, was that a seven or a nine. The third is transfer: a figure copied by hand lands in the wrong column. With electronic entry all three disappear at once, because the entry is made alongside the work and the same row carries forward as it is.

Why rollouts fail

The commonest reason is not the software but the feeling in the field that the new system adds work. If making an entry takes longer than filling in a slip, the system is abandoned regardless of what management decides. That is why the only meaningful measure is how many taps recording one working day takes on a phone.

How to make the move

Start with one thing: hours alone. Do not adopt everything at once. Take one crew and one site first, watch for a week how the entries accumulate, and adjust the work types to match your own work. Once the hours are flowing, add expenses, then trips. Within a month you have a whole that nobody resists, because it was built one step at a time.

What to do with the old data

There is no point moving old timesheets into the system. Keep them as they are for the period the law requires and start the electronic records from a clean period, for instance from the turn of a month or a year. Running two systems side by side is what wears people out.