Timesheets are the lifeblood and necessary evil of any professional services organization. It serves as a means by which budgets are managed, customers are invoiced, and projects monitored. But what are timesheets without reviews? Organizations depend greatly on the accuracy and timeliness of timesheet entries which makes reviews of said timesheets all that much more important. Here are some key benefits to ensuring that timesheets are reviewed thoroughly.
Accurate Billing
I know this should go without saying but unfortunately there are organizations that simply blindly rely on timesheets to ensure billing goes out. The accuracy of timesheets will directly impact your billings to your customers, depending on the contractual agreements. The last thing you want to have happen is to under or overbill a customer because someone did not validate the accuracy of your timesheets being entered by team members. Besides the fact that you have the potential to generate distrust with your customer by giving an inaccurate invoice, it also erodes customer confidence in your ability to deliver services for them. I mean, if you can’t manage your own team’s timesheets, are they going to trust you to deliver software and solutions for their organization?
Customer Relationships
Diving more into the customer relationship side of it, timesheets are often provided as detailed support for customer invoices. Timesheet reviews are absolutely critical in these situations because more often than not, comments associated with timesheet entries are provided to the customer and absolutely need to be customer friendly. Everyone has bad days and while customers can call with what we perceive to be annoying issues, it absolutely cannot translate into the timesheet comments with that. Hence the importance of having a manager or project manager review timesheets and ensure that comments are in line with what the customer would expect to see on that timesheet.
Heuristic Data
Timesheets are a great source of data when trying to understand the cost and schedule for delivering services to your customers. When bidding on new work, having good timesheet data to go back to for similar projects is invaluable to the sales and bidding process. With quality timesheets to look back on, you are able to validate your pricing to your prospect and explain with certainty and detail what it is that the project would cost and why.
