The ability of any company to monitor and evaluate the money spent in support of their business is crucial to its success. While most companies have a system in place to deal with their own employee payroll, such is not always the case when it comes to tracking the cost of contracted labor. The design and functionality of this application is primarily directed toward the control of costs related to hourly, skilled craft, contract labor.

Labor Cost Tracker (LCT) is a tool that facilitates:

• Rapid input of contract labor time spent against specific tasks.
• Daily vendor accounting and approval for crew work time, down to the individual crewmember level.
• Automatic calculation of costs based upon hours worked and established rates for the craft/classification of the individuals performing the assigned tasks.
• Daily client authorization for allocation of funds against specified accounts/contracts.
• Vendor and client access to extensive reporting features for progress monitoring, spending trends, and account reconciliation. The data is current to the completion time of the last approval/authorization cycle.
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for transfer of appropriate data from the client' s LCT system to the vendor' s accounting system.
• Interfacing with electronic time clock devices for recording accurate clock-in/out information.
• Long term archiving of timesheet/expenditure data.

Through the use of LCT, the vendor develops the daily timesheets for each crewmember. The vendor representative then approves the timesheet.

A Client representative may review and authorize the expenditure of funds, based upon the hours allocated to a specified task and the current applicable rate schedule.

If desired, the vendor may elect to use the EDI, or some other means, to export the authorized timesheet data to an external (payroll/accounting) system.

Process

The Labor Cost Tracker system provides a means to manage the contract labor costs by ensuring that vendor and client have rapid access to timely and accurate time and cost information. To accomplish this task requires the participation of individuals who are authorized to enter and manipulate the security, personnel, rates, time, and task information required by the system.

Security

In as much as LCT is a system that is concerned with allocation of funds related to contractual agreements, security is essential. In support of this issue, one or more individuals must fulfill the role of system administrator.

The system administrator has the authority and responsibility for setting the access permission levels for all the individuals that will be entering or manipulating system data. Other system users may have specified and limited control of portions of the system and data as granted by the system administrator.

Personnel

Information regarding personnel whose time will be monitored and recorded must have a record established for them within LCT. Each individual personnel record contains such information as: name, craft, classification, shift, etc.

Craft rates

The billing rates that apply to the hours worked are established by the terms of the appropriate contract. A designated individual, whose system permissions have been granted through the application security module, by the system administrator, maintains this rate information.

Work actions

LCT provides a hierarchical structure for allocation of labor costs to specific accounts or cost codes. These costs are ultimately related to tasks performed under a work action.

All work must be performed on the basis of a Work Action (WA) that has been defined within LCT. WAs may have a narrow or broad scope. The actual work performed is defined as one or more Tasks governed by the WA. It is the Task to which the time and charges are finally applied.

Timesheets & approval

Tasks are assigned to a vendor foreman/supervisor who, in turn, directs crewmembers in their accomplishment. The foreman is responsible for initiating a timesheet, applying the individual crewmember? s time to specific tasks, and approving the timesheet.

Time authorization

Once the vendor foreman approves the timesheet, the client superintendent must review the timesheets and authorize expenditure of funds for the time submitted.

Exporting data

Export of authorized timesheet information may be accomplished through the use of an EDI compliant export function. Alternatively, data may be exported to a spreadsheet file. The export feature permits vendors to provide their own payroll/accounting systems with the original timesheet information, facilitating rapid reconciliation of accounts.

Timesheet historical data & reporting

Client authorized timesheets become part of an historical record of transactions. This historical record remains an on-line resource from which reports may be produced. LCT provides a number of «canned» reports that have been determined to be most useful and frequently requested.

Off-line archives

Permanent, off-line, archiving of historical data will be available through a mechanism similar to export.