How to automate labour costs against project budgets

So, a lot of our customers, a lot of our clients will come to us and ask the question of how they can automate the labour costs against their projects. So, we might be using time sheets, we might be using a digital version, it could be spreadsheets, it could be collecting the information in WhatsApp, it could be a time tracking app that we’ve invested in. A lot of the time, but that’s giving us the information such as where the employee was, basically what time they started at, what time they finished that.

And the costing piece of that a lot of times has to duplicate. So, if it’s coming in from a time tracking app, maybe we have to calculate the cost, maybe calculate what the true cost is versus the payroll cost and deploy that against the project. Or we’re looking at this via time sheets or a payroll cost and accounting software.

Either way, there’s a manual step, a lot of time, that has to be taken to take that cost and deploy it into the project. Within LiveCosts, once we have our project set up, we’ll have that project broken down into different phases. Sometimes we’ll just allocate labour as a total sum and we want to break labour down into different elements, such as site costs or design costs or whatever the case might be.

Whatever way you decide to structure the project, what’s important is we get the labour in against that and we do it automatically. So, how we track the time is we have access to an adjoining mobile app, which is basically going to be the collector of the time sheets. So, our supervisors on site can collect the time from here, or they can pick up the individual time sheets from the guys on site.

So, in this time section here, I’ll have the ability just to add time entries, which is essentially going to collect that data. Once that data is inputted, again, it could be an individual level, it could be a project level. I can then ping LiveCosts back here under time, under employees.

And what’s going to happen is it’s going to build these either daily, weekly, depending on how we want that information coming in. It’s going to tell me where they are, what they’re working on. And I can come in here and basically say, yes, I approve. Yes, I approve. Yes, I approve. And now we have a direct relationship between the labour as it’s coming in because it’s going to deploy the costs straight up to the projects.

Meaning that when I click into my job, I want to get a breakdown on labour. So, if I click in over here, I want to just see a high-level view of what the labour spend is. I get that sum at the project level.

If I want to track it against different cost codes, I can get it in against that level. So, it’s about automating the cost, the true cost of what it costs us to have these individuals on the site, and then automating that via mobile app against the project and phase.