Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Schedule variance is SV = EV − PV: earned value minus planned value at a point in time. Negative means behind plan. The result is in currency, not days, and it has a property most explanations omit — as a project finishes, earned value converges on planned value, so SV approaches zero and the schedule performance index approaches 1.0 even when the project is late.

A timesheet error is a difference between hours worked and hours recorded. The expensive ones are small and regular rather than large and rare: 6 minutes a day costs $27,500.00 a year across 50 people at $22.00 an hour, and amounts to 1.25% of a 40-hour week — below the threshold any practical review would flag. Under 29 CFR § 785.11, hours the employer knows or has reason to believe were worked count as hours worked whether or not they were recorded. > This is not legal advice.

Contractor time tracking records hours against work rather than against a schedule. The distinction matters beyond bookkeeping: the IRS asks whether a business controls “or has the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job,” so a system that sets a contractor’s hours is itself a factor. And the rate at which a contractor stops being cheaper than an employee is $53.01, not the $32.82 an employee earns. > This is not legal or tax advice.

The timesheet approval process is the set of steps between an employee recording hours and those hours reaching payroll: submission, review, correction, approval and period close. The deadline is not chosen, it is counted backwards from pay date. The review is not a matter of diligence, it is a matter of how many hours the approver has.

A GPS time clock records a location alongside each clock-in and clock-out, so a timesheet carries where the work started as well as when. It answers the attendance question for field crews that a desk time clock cannot. It does not provide continuous proof of presence: the accuracy figures in circulation measure the satellite signal rather than a phone, and a geofence confirms position at the moment of a fix rather than detecting the moment someone leaves. > This is not legal advice.

An employee monitoring policy is a written document that tells employees what the employer monitors, why, where, how long the data is kept and who can see it. Four states — New York, Delaware, Connecticut and Maine — require notice before monitoring begins, each by a different mechanism, and two of those four laws changed during 2026. The template below is free to copy in three formats, and the sections marked with brackets are the ones you replace.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency issues no timekeeping regulation. The requirements come from the contract: DFARS 252.242-7006(c)(9) and (c)(10) require a timekeeping system that identifies labor by cost objective and a labor distribution system that charges direct and indirect labor correctly. Everything else called a “DCAA requirement” is audit practice derived from those two criteria and from the FAR cost principles.

Agency time tracking exists to answer one question: did the fee cover the work. A $12,000 monthly retainer at a $120 target rate funds 100 hours. Deliver 128 and the effective rate drops to $93.75, with 28 hours of over-servicing worth $3,360. Hours by client, by role and by activity are what turn a retainer into a margin number.

Law firms bill time in tenths of an hour: six minutes is 0.1. Each entry carries a matter number, a timekeeper, the time, and a description of the work. Firms acting for corporate clients and insurers add UTBMS task codes and submit invoices in the LEDES format. The ABA Model Rules require the fee to be reasonable and the basis for it to be communicated to the client — and say nothing at all about rounding, which is where most of the trouble starts.

A project management dashboard shows the few numbers that tell you whether a project will finish on time and on budget. The core set is schedule variance, cost variance, the schedule and cost performance indexes, and a forecast of final cost. All four come from three inputs: the budget, the percentage of work actually complete, and the cost incurred to date.