Tracking labor on a construction site - from the attendance sheet to cost price
At the end of the month the attendance sheet says Georgi worked 22 days of 8 hours. That is enough to calculate his pay. It does not say which of the three sites he was on, or whether he was laying brick or unloading trucks. And those two answers decide whether the site makes money or loses it on labor.
Below is what to record, who should do it, and how the records become a figure you can compare with the offer.
Why hours by project are more than a payroll sheet
Labor is the one big site cost that comes without an invoice. Materials arrive with a document, and so does rented equipment. Your own workers are paid through one payroll for the whole company, and if nobody recorded who was where, the cost stays unallocated.
A record by project and type of work does three things.
The first is cost price. When you know that 640 hours of brickwork went into the project, rather than "some people for two weeks", you can multiply the hours by the cost of one hour and get the labor cost of that work. What goes into the full labor cost and the rest of the calculation is covered in the article on cost price in construction.
The second is the comparison with the offer. Every unit price has some labor allowed for in it. Take sample numbers: for 400 m2 of brickwork you allowed 1.2 hours per square meter, 480 hours in total. If 640 went into the site, the difference is 160 hours. At €12 an hour that is €1,920 on this item alone. Without a record by type of work you would only see that wages for the month are "a bit more than expected".
The third is reporting to the client. When you work at an hourly rate, or the client disputes additional work, a record of who did what and when is your evidence. The people and hours recorded by day also underpin cost control and the conversation when the next offer is priced.
What to record
Four things. People will not fill in more than that.
- Who. A specific person, not "Ivan's crew". If you record by crew, at least make the headcount for the day accurate.
- Where. The project. When a person was on one site in the morning and another in the afternoon, that is two records.
- How much. The hours for the day, with overtime kept apart from regular hours. Merged into one number, they hide both the higher cost of the labor and the reason for it.
- What work. This is the part that is most often missing. You do not need to go down to a bill of quantities item. A breakdown that matches the way you price is enough: formwork, rebar, brickwork, plaster, general works.
The last one needs a little preparation at the start of the site: agree a short list of work types in advance. Give people forty options and they pick the first one.
Who fills it in and when
There are two ways. In the first, everyone fills in their own hours. The record is more accurate because a person remembers their own day, but everyone needs access to the system and the habit of opening it. In the second, the foreman or the site manager fills it in for everyone. There is one record and it is tidy, but it depends on the memory and time of one person who already has plenty to do.
Two conditions apply to both: it is filled in every day, not on Friday afternoon for the whole week, and it is approved by someone else who knows the site and can say "it rained on Wednesday and you did not do any formwork".
What goes wrong with paper
A paper form is not bad in itself. The problems come from its trip to the office.
It arrives late. The sheet sits in the site hut until the end of the week or the month and reaches the office when nothing can be fixed any more. If the brickwork is running a third over the allowance, you want to know in the second week, not after the last payroll.
It cannot be read. Someone in the office retypes handwriting written on a knee into Excel, and every retyping adds errors.
It is filled in by eye. When the form is written after the fact, every cell says 8. The hours come out equal, the overtime disappears, and the type of work is whatever came last.
And finally, it does not add up. Even accurate sheets are still separate sheets. To see the hours by project for the month, someone has to total them by hand.
What the law requires and what it does not
A record by project is a management tool. It does not replace the documents an employer keeps under labor law, and it is best not to confuse the two. Here is what the Labor Code (LC) and the Ordinance on Working Time, Breaks and Leave (OWTBL) say in Bulgaria.
- Under Art. 142(1) LC, working time is calculated in working days, day by day. Paragraph 2 allows the employer to introduce summarized calculation in the manner set by an ordinance of the Council of Ministers, and under paragraph 3 the period for it is from 1 to 4 months.
- Where summarized calculation applies, the employer approves named work schedules for the whole period and keeps them for at least 3 years after it ends (Art. 9a(1) OWTBL).
- A special register is kept for overtime, and the overtime worked during the year is reported to the labor inspectorate by 31 January of the following year (Art. 149 LC).
- On the site and the work area, the employer keeps available to the inspection authorities a copy of the internal labor rules and the documents on the distribution of working time, including overtime orders and, under summarized calculation, the named schedules (Art. 403a(1) LC).
This article is not legal advice. How exactly to organize working time in your company is something to settle with your accountant or a labor law lawyer.
From hours to cost on the project
First, the hours are totaled by project and type of work for the period. Second, they are multiplied by a cost per hour. That is not the gross wage divided by the hours: it also includes the employer's social security contributions, leave, and the time the person is on payroll but not on site. Third, the resulting number is set next to the labor allowed for in the offer for the same work.
The comparison only makes sense if both sides are broken down the same way. That is why the types of work in the record must follow the structure of the offer, not the other way round.
How this looks in Construction Team
The Timesheets module is in the Field section and has two parts: hours and work reports.
Hours are entered in a weekly grid from Monday to Sunday, on the My timesheet page. Each row is a project and, optionally, a task within that project, with a description field. The columns are the days. Overtime goes in a separate cell under the regular hours and is totaled separately. Each user fills in their own week. With Submit for approval the week is locked for them, and people with approval rights get a notification. The approver sees the weeks by employee and can approve or reject, with a rejection reason required. A rejected week is unlocked for correction.
The Hours by project page brings together what was recorded: for a chosen period it shows regular and overtime hours for each project, with a filter for approved hours only and export to Excel. The report is in hours, not money. Multiplying by the cost per hour and comparing with the offer is something you do yourself for now, with your own rate.
Work reports arrived with version 1.15 and are for labor paid by output. The site manager prepares a template with a list of activities. Each activity has a unit of measure, a rate for the worker and a selling price to the client. The worker picks a template, a project and a date and enters the quantities, for example 18 m2 of formwork. The foreman can submit a report for the work of a whole crew.
At approval you can see how much has already been approved for the same activity on the project, and quantities and rates can be corrected line by line. Selling prices are visible only to users with the right to manage work reports.
Two things come out of the approved reports. The Piecework pay report calculates quantity times rate for each worker and warns when there are also approved hours for the same days, so the same work is not paid twice. And from the approved reports for one project a draft act to the client is created (the Bulgarian statement of completed work): where an activity matches a contract item unambiguously, the contract price is used, and activities without a selling price stay internal and do not go into the act.
The two parts answer different questions. Hours tell you how much time went in, work reports tell you what was done. A company that pays by the day uses the first, and for piecework the second is the one that works. There is more about the module on the timesheets page.
Where to start
Do not start with all sites at once. Pick one you are only now entering. Agree five or six types of work that match the offer. Decide who fills in and who approves. After four weeks, put the hours by type of work next to the allowed ones and see where they diverge. That first comparison usually also shows what to fix in the next offer.
Related Articles
- Site Diary - the people and equipment on site, day by day
- Cost Price in Construction - what goes into the full labor cost and the cost price of the site
- Cost Control in Construction - how to track site costs against the budget
- Labor Shortage in Construction - why the time of the people you have is worth more and more
- Construction Team v1.15 - work reports and the other news in the release
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an attendance sheet and tracking labor by project?
An attendance sheet shows who was at work and for how many hours, so wages can be calculated. Tracking by project adds where the person worked and what they did. Without those two things the hours cannot be assigned to a specific project and type of work, which means they cannot be compared with the labor allowed for in the offer.
What should a labor record contain?
Four things: who worked, on which project, how many hours and on what work. Overtime is written separately from regular hours. A short description helps whoever approves the record understand it without phoning anyone.
Who should fill in the hours - the worker or the site manager?
Both ways work as long as it is clear who is responsible. When everyone fills in their own hours the record is more accurate, but everyone needs access to the system. When the foreman or the site manager fills them in, there is one record, but it depends on one person's memory. In both cases the hours are approved by someone other than the person who wrote them.
Does timesheet software replace the documents required by the Labor Code?
No. The weekly table of hours by project is a management record. The named schedules under summarized working time calculation (Art. 9a of the Ordinance on Working Time, Breaks and Leave) and the special overtime register (Art. 149 of the Labor Code) are kept separately, as the law requires.
How do you track labor that is paid by output rather than by the hour?
With quantities by activity: meters, square meters, pieces. In Construction Team this is what work reports are for. The worker enters quantities against a ready list of activities, the report goes through approval, and the pay and the draft act to the client are calculated from the approved reports.