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Payroll Hours

Is anyone currently using ESC to process their own payroll? I am looking for a best practice to capture an employee's time that is not billable to a dispatch or job. For example, meeting times, waiting time between calls if dispatch does not have a call immediately available, or any time the technicians have a need to come to the building. We are currently using a PDF form outside of ESC to capture this time and it causes headaches trying to align time for payroll each week. I appreciate any suggestions that may be out there.

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  • Hi Ben,  We have created "customers" for unbillable time off.  These "customers" are labeled .holiday, .vacation, .training, .staff meeting.  By having the "." at the beginning of the name, it falls at the top of the customer list.   We have a dispatch type "OFF" that is non-billable.  So when the dispatch is completed it doesn't go into the invoicing queue.  But, when a Tech labor report is run, the actual hours are correct.

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  • Ben,

    I have several company "customers" set up to handle collection of time for other reasons.  Not specifically payroll, however.

    Start a customer with your company name and what ever information you what it to track.  We have customers or locations set up to track things such as:

    Personal Time Off

    Inventory activities, Van cycle counts, etc.

    Techs assigned to overhead tasks.  Training, Van Maintenance, etc.

     

    It is important to have some non-billable "Types" for dispatches so you can keep the system from cluttering up your "Uninvoiced Dispatch" list(s).

    It works well.  Want to cross check how much Personal Time Off / Vacation someone has taken, Just pull up a tech hours report.  You can also define Jobs for in-shop "customers" if that helps.

    Also, since you have a customer for PTO, you can block out vacation time in advance so that dispatch doesn't accidentally schedule a job for someone that won't be there.

    Hope this helps.

    Rick

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  • Hey Ben! I'm not specifically sure how any particular company might be using ESC in this particular fashion, so I hope we can get some comments on here!

    Now, one thing I thought of and that our techs suggest sometimes in these scenarios is the following:

    To track these scenarios we would create a new Customer in the ESC Database.

    We would name it the same as our company, so maybe: John Henry's Plumbing. We would then create a few locations, such as Shop Time, Meeting, Cleaning, etc etc. We'll then start creating Dispatches for the Customer and Location indicating what type of work it would be.

    Example: John Henry's Plumbing - Shop Time.

    Now, we don't want to bill this Dispatch, we just want to track time for Payroll. So we need to also setup a Dispatch Type that can be applied to these Dispatches so they are non-Billable. You'll see what I mean in the picture below. But if you create that new "Dispatch Type" and apply it to these Dispatches; when you Complete these Dispatches you won't be asked to or required to Invoice them.

    Let me know if that helps! But I am curious to see what others come up with too!



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  • Great feedback. I greatly appreciate it. I have a few follow up questions. 

    Are dispatches open and closed each week for each employee that may fall under one of these scenarios? Or do you just leave those dispatches on the mobile queue for the tech to use whenever they need to use?

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  • We do quarterly dispatches for scheduled time off.  We started with yearly, but that bogs the system down.

    Most of the others we do separate invoices per occurrence,  Although if there are multiple people involved, they all go on the same dispatch.  And close them as the task is complete.

    Depending on how detail oriented your dispatcher is, you may want to set up a Dispatch List template to view these jobs regularly.  If they get left open they eventually cause problems.

    This applies to all dispatches, by the way.  If they don't get closed properly, or are left open indefinitely, they will start to affect system performance in a big way.

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  • We do payroll dispatches under each person where they clock-in and clock-out and each day. We have them color coded under a priority and set as a non-billable type. The dispatcher will adjust them only for holiday or PTO time so it shows in the right column. . 

    We also have each person have a customer were we use them for PTO/vacation.

    It makes the boards very cluttered but is a good work around to track hours and not have so much paper as time sheets.

    We run a tech hours report for the tech and date range for each person and they sign it off. We use the "travel" column to count non worked hours such as PTO or holiday. 

    Thanks

    Ashley 

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  • Ashley,

    Is there a reason you don't put the in-house/staff  on a different board?  You'd have to create a second tech for each person to do it, but that would also help separate the payroll time from job time.

    Just a thought.

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  • The reason would be we have them clock in and out on their mobile devices. You can not have two techs assigned.We also have the techs clock out for lunch and back in. This allows us to see what techs have clock in for the day on the board, and who is on lunch. 

    Also when running a report to see if I have overtime in the job for job costing I can clicking see that tech has 9 hours (1 hour OT), when billing I can add this into my labor cost because esc doesn't have a way to track this automatically. .

    Thank

    Ashley 

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  • Makes sense.

    Rick

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