The Logic behind Enforcing the Consultant Timesheet

In the world of business, there always comes a time when a company would choose to hire a consultant to check on the very operations and everything else that is keeping that particular company afloat. This means that the company hires someone outside of the company to go through their operations, as well as their policies and regulation, just to get an outside and more objective view on how things are going in the organization itself. But when it comes to multibillion-dollar corporations where there are just so many employees in the payroll all over the world, managing all the consultants in tow from one branch to another would virtually be impossible. Consultant time tracking then becomes a must, and this is futile without the use of the consultant timesheet.

In its most basic form, tracking actually refers to the activity of ensuring tasks and jobs are completed over the desired timeframe. More importantly, these jobs and tasks are archived accordingly for future perusal. Tracking is then a very efficient tool that can actually make the work of any employee easier because no longer would employees have to physically dispatch tasks, do inventory checks, and conduct employee performance analysis. The timesheet is a very handy tool when it comes to keeping track of your employees and all the activities they take upon each workday.

In a regular 9-5 job, your employees would not really be productive all throughout. There would be 15-minute breaks and 1-hour lunch breaks. And then, there would be those times when your employees would spend idling, just whiling away. With the enforcement of a timesheet, all these unproductive minutes going to waste just might be minimized.

However, the same thing is not really as easy to implement when it comes to consultants. Simply put, these consultants are not really like your average employee on your payroll. They actually come from third-party services or companies that you hire for whatever purpose that you deem. In the setting of a caf9, for instance, a consultant might be hired to do weekly spot-checks on the overall performance of the caf9 – its operations, its food and beverages, as well as its employees. The consultant might be invited to drop by the caf9 at a stipulated time, say, around 9:00 Monday evenings so that he or she can see how the caf9 works at the given time. Good for you if the consultant is indeed prompt when it comes to the entailed duties and responsibilities.

The problem lies when the consultant himself becomes quite the delinquent, and this happens more often than you think. Naturally, you would expect the consultant to be the professional that he is supposed to be, right? How then would you deal with such delinquency? The consultant timesheet then becomes the handy tool here; after all, even if the he has flexible hours and he only reports once a week for just a few hours, he is still under your employ, so to speak. Thus, you are entitled to come up with ways and means to get your money’s worth. This timesheet is indeed one of the tools you can use to do just that.