We are proud of the detail and accuracy of the time sheets that we provide to customers but this isn’t a very common approach so bears some explanation:
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- Monthly Time Sheets – we currently try to send out one time sheet per month per customer which keeps the paperwork to a minimum. We give you a couple of days to check the time sheet and raise any queries before sending out the related sales invoice.
- Corrections – we have multiple processes to review task time data before it gets sent out to you as a time sheet, but with thousands of log entries each month it’s possible that the odd mistake creeps through – time that should have been charged and wasn’t or vice-versa – we do recommend you check the time sheet carefully each month and raise any questions asap. We’ll review your query and if we agree then we’ll either re-issue the time sheet or add a correction line to the sales invoice.
- Discounted Time – this is time that is logged that is not charged…this could be:
- Repeating or correcting work that wasn’t right first time (although we will charge for the time if we advised you against in the first place!).
- Time spent on internal training or knowledge transfer – if we weren’t doing the task for you, we wouldn’t be spending the time, but why should you pay for it?
- Major traffic delays when travelling to/from site excluding peak traffic hour delays (this is a bit subjective, but we will always try hard to be fair).
- Totals – this is really important and useful…at the bottom of each time sheet are 3 totals:
- Fixed Items – this is the time time logged against work included as part of a maintenance contract or that was quoted at a fixed rate – this is for information so you/we can review the value of the contract and the quotes.
- Charged Items – this is time from the time sheet for which you will be billed.
- Discount Items – most support companies do work that isn’t billed, but the customers rarely see this – we record the time as part of our standard working processes so we are able to include this on time sheets to show customers how much time we’ve spent on tasks for them that is not being charged.
- Rounding – we charge the time taken do a job…the exact time, nothing more or less…we don’t round time up (or down) and we don’t bill in minimum chunks of 15 minutes or 60 minutes – if a task takes 11 minutes that’s what goes on the time sheet.
- Task Entries – we won’t apologise…these are (very) detailed and for some customers can result in a time sheet spanning many (MANY) pages for a month. We believe in total transparency and strive for complete trust and if we didn’t provide this level of detail, if we provided time sheets with 1 hour chunks then you wouldn’t really know what we’ve been up to and any little seed of doubt that is sown becomes a potential obstacle to our trusted partnership…we say “No, no, no” to that possibility and work really hard to be open in everything we do.
- Travel Time – we’re very happy to provide onsite support, but we need to charge for the time spent travelling as it is real time that we cannot give to supporting you (or other customers!):
- We charge it at our server/network hourly rate to make some allowance for mileage and parking costs.
- Where we can combine/share visits we will share the travel time fairly between jobs/customers.
- To be fair to customers local to our offices and to be realistic with customers further afield, we charge for the actual time taken to travel to your site per person.
- If possible we’ll schedule onsite visits outside of peak traffic times to keep travel time as short as possible.
- We also charge loading/unloading time as this is part of the costs of coming to your site, as well as any time arranging access to a site, including collecting keys etc.