Most employees work a standard 40-hour week, and perform the same tasks over and over again, week after week. However, the typical time tracking system requires them to complete a timesheet every week. Since they see no point in submitting the same information every week, employees continually forget to submit timesheets on a timely basis, which means that the payroll staff has to spend time contacting them with reminders. Thus, a considerable amount of time is wasted by everyone to submit the same timekeeping information every week.
In situations where hours worked are essentially the same on an ongoing basis, a good alternative is to create a default time record in the timekeeping system, and only require employees to change it if they have non-standard hours to report, such as overtime or a short work week. A lesser alternative for companies using a computer-based timekeeping system is to install a single button on-screen that employees can press if they simply want to copy forward their timesheet from the preceding week. Yet another variation applicable to salaried employees is for them to only submit a timesheet when they are recording paid time off, such as vacation, sick, jury duty, or military time.
This solution works less well when employees are charging their time to specific jobs that change frequently. If these are billable jobs for which time recording must be accurate, then there is little opportunity to use this best practice. However, if the reason for charging to jobs is for internal cost accounting purposes that is not required by an external entity, it is possible that the cost accounting staff can be convinced to reduce or eliminate their time tracking requirements on the grounds that the labor component of most jobs in the production area is only a small component of the total cost, and that the cost of time tracking is therefore not worth the resulting additional cost information.