Blog/ Working time
Working time across several sites in one day
A leak in Purvciems in the morning, sockets in Imanta at lunchtime, a boiler service in Jurmala at the end of the day. That night you have to remember how long you spent at each and how far you drove. Usually you do not.
With one site a day you can write the time on a scrap of paper. With three, the paper starts to lie. Half an hour here, twenty minutes there, and the invoice gets what you remember, not what you worked.
Those lost minutes seem small, but by the end of the month they add up to several hours never billed.
Where the time goes
Most of the time is lost not on the job itself but between jobs:
- Driving from one site to the next, which is never written down anywhere.
- A trip to the shop for missing material in the middle of a job.
- Waiting for the client to show up or turn off the water, and work left unfinished until tomorrow.
Each of these counts differently. Travel you can bill to the client at a rate or not at all, but you need to know how much there was. Waiting is not work, but unfinished work carries on the next day.
Log the time when it happens, not in the evening when you need it for the invoice.
A simple way that works
You do not need a complicated system. Three habits are enough, and you can start them tomorrow:
- When you arrive on site, start the timer for this job, not for the whole day.
- When you go to the shop or have to wait, press pause. When you carry on, carry on the same job.
- Log the kilometres against the job you drove to.
In Kvedo every job has its own timer with a pause, and an unfinished job stays on the home screen in the Paused jobs section, so tomorrow you can carry on from there. Add the travel and kilometres to the job, and in the evening each site has its own invoice with no retyping.
