Contractor Timesheet Management

Managing Contractors, Outsourcers, Sub-Contractors and other non-staff employees can be a tremendous challenge. Getting a handle on where your contractors are spending the time you are paying them for is a big step towards great contractor management.

In today's world of outsourcing and human capital partnering, it is common to find a team made up of personnel from multiple sources. There are sub-contractors, partner contractors, outsourced personnel from the prime contractor and outsourced personnel from the sub-contractor. Techniques from such as co-locating an entire team and just accounting for them based on their salaried costs is a thing of the past.

In today's ever-shrinking world, there are many factors used to determine who will be working on a project and those organizations which are most effective are those who have designed management practices that have been adapted to a multi-course team.

There are two aspects of sub-contractor management that are commonly a challenge for the client: The first is invoice management. In most organizations, the existing sub-contractor invoice procedure sounds a little like this:

At the end of the month (or billing cycle) the personnel of each contractor complete the contractor's timesheet and sends it back to their principle.
Each contractor submits a summary invoice to you, the client. It arrives by the middle of the month following the work being completed.
You now take that summary invoice and start comparing it to internal documentation. You must now burst the contractor's invoice into parts (usually manually) to show time per project. Within 2-3 weeks after receiving the invoice, the internal report has been sent to individual project managers
Project managers review the time spent on their project by each contractor and using internal documents try to validate all of the hours. The oldest work represented in the report is now 8-10 weeks old. If there are any discrepancies, they are referred back to the internal invoice department who must.

The second challenge is the approval process. When you use TimeControl to track both your internal and external project personnel, the work of your subcontractors becomes part of your normal approval process. TimeControl's unique Matrix Approval Process for Labor Actuals™ allows you to do approvals both by organization and by line item. The impact on contractor management is significant. Deciphering an invoice weeks after the contractor's work was completed to try to match the hours in the invoice to hours worked on a project is a thing of the past. The new process is simplicity itself:

All workers use TimeControl for timesheet management. Timesheets are approved each week by both supervisors and project managers.
At the end of the month, you, the client gives the contracting companies a list of hours that are already accepted in the system.
The contractor submits an invoice. If the invoice matches what you already have approved, then there is nothing else to do. If the invoice does not, it is incumbent on the contractor to explain why.

There are benefits for both the client and the contractor by using TimeControl for both internal and contractor personnel:

Shortcut the invoice approval process. Save countless hours of purchasing personnel, clerks, project managers, contract managers and even the contractors themselves.
Find out what the contractors are working on, not just how much time they're working
Find out how long it takes contractors to finish the tasks you've assigned
Compare the performance of internally trained personnel to contractor personnel
For contractors: Get paid faster
For the client: negotiate an early payment discount because you're now able to approve the invoice in days, not weeks

Improving your contractor management by using TimeControl timesheet just makes sense. Talk to one of our product specialists by completing our Contact Us form to see how TimeControl can help you.

Contractor Timesheet Management

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