What is Time Management?
Time Management involves the use of electronic time sheets to enter the amount of time spent on activities.
Activities are the tasks that people work on.
When someone enter his or her time, he or she specifies what activities were worked on and how much time was spent on each activity.
What are the setup requirements?
TeemWork keeps track of the time spent by people on activities. Obviously, TeemWork needs to know who the people are and what activities can be worked on.
Figuring out who the people are is easy. They are the 'users' of your TeemWork team. Your team Administrator can add new users to your team.
The team Administrator also determines what activities can be worked on. (Note: The team Administrator may decide to delegate this task to others.)
The process is simple.
A list of the activities that are relevant to your organization is produced. Each of these activities is given a name.
Similar activities are grouped. Each group of activities becomes an 'activity type'. A name is given to each of these 'activity types'.
Then you determine who can work on, or charge time to, each activity.
Once this is done, you are ready to enter these activities and specify who can work on them.
Adding activities and designating activity participants is carried out in the 'Activities' window.
Why use Time Management?
The purpose of Time Management is to help you keep track of:
how much time was worked by a 'user' during a given day or week.
how much time was spent on any given activity.
As we will see below, TeemWork's Time Management can also be used for other purposes such as keeping track of unused vacation time per 'user'.
How to keep track of time worked by a 'user'.
In TeemWork, people use Time Sheets to enter how their time was spent.
For each work day, each user enters what activities were worked and how much time was spent for each activity.
The figure below shows what Lisa Brown worked, on Monday, January 29, 2001.
Time worked can also be viewed by week rather than by day.
The figure below shows what Joe Levy worked during the week of January 28, 2001.
Click here to find out more about time sheets.
How to keep track of time spent on an activity.
TeemWork makes it easy to find out how much time was spent on an activity.
We have seen that adding activities and designating activity participants is carried out in the 'Activities' window. This window is illustrated below.
As you can see there is a tab labelled 'Time spent on this activity'. A click on this tab displays the amount of time spent on the selected activity.
The figure below displays all the time that was spent on activity 'inventory Dev. HD Inc.'
This window can also be used to view the time spent on an activity during a given period of time. You can specify that you want to see the time spent by all or by a specific person only.
Click here for more about the 'Activity Details' tab.
Click here for more about the 'Time spent on this Activity' tab.
Are there any standard activities in TeemWork?
Yes. Each team has eight standard default activities. They are:
Office Work
Training Received
Legal Holidays
Vacation Time
Sick Time
Absent with pay
Absent without pay
OverTime reclaimed
If you use Time Management, it is up to you to specify which of your users can charge time to each of these activities.
Why bother with standard activities?
For some activities, keeping track of how much time was spent on it by whom and when is fine, but insufficient.
Most organizations need to know how much remaining 'Vacation Time' is due to each of their employees. Many organizations need to know how much 'Sick Time', 'Training Time' and 'OverTime' an employee has remaining.
TeemWork provides special additional accounting for these activities.
For each of these activities, TeemWork manages the equivalent of a 'Bank Account'. What is recorded in the account is not money, it is time.
Let us consider the case of 'Vacation Time'.
By default, each user has a 'Vacation Time' account. The employer may deposit time into the 'Vacation Time' account of any employee.
When an employee enters 'Vacation Time' on his or her time sheet, this means that the employee took some time off and that this time off is deemed to be 'Vacation Time'. When this happens, the entered 'vacation time' is automatically deducted the employees 'Vacation Time' account.
The same can be said for 'Sick Time' and 'Training Time'.
The 'OverTime' table is handled similarly.
When an employee enters 'OverTime' on his or her time sheet, this time multiplied by the overtime rate (such as time and a half) is added to his or her 'OverTime' account. The employee banks the OverTime hours for a rainy day.
When an employee enters time for activity 'OverTime Reclaimed' on his or her time sheet, this means that the employee took some time off and that this time off is deemed to be time to be deducted from previously accumulated OverTime.
TeemWork does this automatically. Manual adjustments to OverTime due can also be made by team Administrators.
This special accounting for OverTime is designed for organizations that allow employees to take paid time off as payment for overtime previously worked.
To learn more about accounting of 'Vacation time', 'Sick Time', 'Training Time' received and 'Over Time', read about 'The Vacation and Sick Time' tab.
Return to the FAQ page.