Dashpivot article – Daily crew timesheet
Daily Crew Timesheet
What is a Daily Crew Timesheet, and How Does it Differ From an Individual Timesheet?
A daily crew timesheet is a document that is used to record the working hours of the entire crew or team, including their tasks for the day and job details.
It’s an essential tool for businesses, especially those managing large teams like the construction and manufacturing industries, to keep track of accurate labour working hours, payroll processing, and project management.
In the construction industry, crew members may perform a variety of tasks like electrical works, site preparation, plumbing, carpentry, and others. It’s crucial to record the working hours of specific tasks to keep track of the work progress. While in manufacturing, crews may work in different shift. Additionally, they may work on different production lines. A daily crew timesheet also helps in tracking equipment usage based on the crews' working hours.
Instead of having individual crew members fill out a daily timesheet, it’s more practical to have a single crew timesheet that consolidates time entries of multiple workers. It details the specific jobs of each team member but under one collective entry. This way, it’s easier for team leads, managers, or supervisors in tracking the resources efficiently. Aside from that, managers don’t have to approve a couple of individual timesheets. A crew could even have a hundred employees, and managers don’t have that time for approving individual entries or any other administrative work. A daily crew timesheets also serves as an overview of what the crew members have done in a day, which is extremely helpful in project management.
A daily crew timesheet is typically filled out by the team leader, manager, or supervisor that distributes the workload and sets the schedule of the team. This is most especially helpful for group tasks, rather than individual tasks. Its contents differ from an individual timesheet and can be a little more complex, since it accounts more multiple roles. Its structure and contents should be catered and fit for team-based type of work.
You can use and edit this construction timesheet template here to suit your crews.
Types of Crew Timesheet Structures
A daily crew timesheet has a variety of structures and designs which caters the needs of businesses, different industries, types of projects, scheduling, and team configurations. Choosing the right daily crew timesheet depends on many factors like the size of the workforce, complexity of tasks, level of detail needed by the organisation in tracking the working hours and productivity, and many more.
Below will be examples created in Excel for easier viewing through columns and rows.
Basic Daily Crew Timesheet
This is the simplest form of a daily crew timesheet used by small teams or simpler projects.
Project-Based Structure
This structure is especially use for when the crew is assigned to multiple projects or sites.
Shift-based Daily Crew Timesheet Structure
This structure is useful for when crews work by shifts.
With these various structures of a daily crew timesheet, manual tracking of timesheets cannot fully serve the needs, requirements, and factors. Will manual/paper-based timesheets actually perform as well as digital timesheets? Ultimately, organisations must consider if a paper-based or digital timesheets works for their operational needs.
Paper-based vs. Digital Daily Crew Timesheets
Paper-based daily crew timesheets are simple and easy to use. Small organisations sometimes still opt for this manual method because it’s what they’re used to and there’s no need to train workers how to fill them out.
They just simply write down their entries, and then done. There’s no need to invest in any software or hardware, and it’s the go-to option when the crew are working in areas without internet access. Some teams also prefer storing hard copies of timesheets for compliance and auditing.
However, more and more business are shifting into using digital tools and proper timesheet apps for daily crew timesheets due to the limitations manual, and paper-based timesheets offer.
Manual entries will always be prone to errors. Workers may not enter data correctly, miss out on fields, have bad penmanship, or tamper with existing entries. Manually writing down the hours also takes a lot of time, especially when dealing with a large crew, and if the physical papers keep piling and growing, all records would need physical space. It’s difficult to store actual papers, and it’s time-consuming to retrieve data when you need them. Passing around the timesheets may even result in lost or damaged records. With multiple records on hand, managers would be forced to do more administrative work in collecting and reviewing the timesheets manually. It’s not the best idea if the business is scaling and growing.
Digital daily crew timesheets streamlines the entire attendance tracking with a user-friendly interface for data entry. If the digital tools have features that allow automated calculations, it reduces the errors in time tracking and in payroll management. Since digital tools are stored in the cloud, it’s easier to store and retrieve data whenever needed for reports, compliance, and audits. It’s more secure, reduces the risk of falsification, and can be accessed using mobile phone or tablets.
Overall, small business may do okay with paper-based timesheets, but with the fast-paced industries and demands of the market, it’s ideal to consider shifting into using digital tools.
Larger companies with multiple crew and team members, or teams with complex scheduling, would greatly benefit from using digital tools for their timesheets.
It saves them time from doing time-consuming administrative work and use gathered data for employee performance, attendance tracking, payroll management, and resource allocation.
Daily Crew Timesheets Done Well
We’ve already established that digital tools are better compared to manual/paper-based digital crew timesheets, but which digital tool to use? There are so many digital tools in the market offering to streamline timesheet process, but what sets Dashpivot apart?
Dashpivot is the digital solution that can streamline many of the various structures laid out earlier by offering a fill-out form type of look in daily crew timesheets, automated calculations, real-time tracking, data synchronisation and collaboration, and data analytics. It’s an information management system where you can create and customise your own daily crew timesheet document using a drag-and-drop form builder, and it’ll look like a digitised daily timesheet form but better. You can set prefilled texts like, and add text fields for users to fill out. Other drag-and-drop sections include date fields, dropdown, tables, e-signature, photos, sketches, and many more.
Earlier, we built the various structures in Excel to make it easier to view the columns and rows. In Dashpivot, you can design a similar structure using the default or prefilled table fields. Similarly with Excel’s formulas and functions, Dashpivot offers automated calculations with almost-near syntax as Excel’s. You can easily set cells as formula fields, and automate calculations for total working hours, breaks, overtime hours, total pay, and more.
After building your standardised daily crew timesheet using Dashpivot’s drag-and-drop form builder, managers can create forms and fill out daily crew timesheets. They can simply enter the details, and the automated calculations accurately display the results.
Additionally, Dashpivot allows timesheet approval workflows. Instead of managers or supervisors manually collecting, reviewing, and signing off paper-based timesheets, or if you’re using Excel and just attaching photos for signatures, Dashpivot enables digital approvals and automated tracking using signature fields. Approvers can review the entries, making the necessary adjustments, and add comments. Dashpivot provides a clear audit trail, and users can see when the timesheets are in approval or completed process. Approvers can also send back the forms back for revision or draft.
By using Dashpivot to standardise your daily crew timesheets and automating the calculations and approvals, it can significantly improve the overall operational efficiency, reduce admin workload, ensure accurate entries, provide timely and correct payments, and manage the workforce smoothly and seamlessly.
What makes Dashpivot an Effective Solution for Workforce Management and Timesheet Tracking?
Aside from Dashpivot being a form builder, a tool that automates calculations, and allows approval workflows, it has other great features that make it an effective solution for workforce management timesheet tracking.
Dashpivot allows real-time data entry, synchronisation, and collaboration between crew members. The users can easily submit timesheets and reports from their mobile devices or tablets, and supervisors on site can see their entries in their Dashpivot database. Even offline, Dashpivot saves the progress and uploads data once there’s internet access.
Since Dashpivot is cloud-based, all of your daily crew timesheets are stored in the cloud. You can easily view, search, and retrieve timesheets for compliance or audit. It features a flexible folder system where you can organise your folders and files however you want it to be. Additionally, you can layer permissions across folders so only certain users have access to them, to avoid anyone from accidentally deleting or tampering with documents.
Using all of your daily crew timesheet documents stored in the centralised database, you can generate reports for analytics, workforce productivity, labour costs, compliance and audits. Use dashboards and charts, and link across all timesheets.
Dashpivot is specially designed to digitise and automate timesheets, making it so much easier for businesses to create their own standardised daily crew timesheet, automate calculations, approve, and analyse them effectively.
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