I am just going to whine and rant about completing and submitting Timesheets.
As a consultant I had the Opportunity 🙂 to fill in a maximum of 3 timesheets for the same work I was doing. One to my consultancy company, one for the group/department/team/whatever and one for the billing folks.
The timesheet for my consulting company is the simplest of them all. Just complete an Excel spreadsheet and fax/email. Otherwise they are usually just complex and slowly working softwares.
For some reason, several companies have adopted a Web-based (intranet) software to track time. And I have never seen a fast one. It takes ages to fill them up.
Apart from the technical issues, sometimes the demand to break the work into a finite unit gets on to the nerves. Requiring to capture work done at the level of 15/30 minutes is not unknown. To top it, the billing systems use different categories/codes to Capitalize or Expense the work.
I know consultants who work in a Report Generation teams that are spending more than 90 minutes each week just entering the time. If the company is some kind of Third Party Administrator (TPA), then they want to capture the information as accurately as possible so that they can bill their customers correctly.
I understand the need to record the time accurately and judiciously. But sometimes it is just frustrating a chore.
Anybody have similar experiences?