Perhaps liberate is a bit strong, but the truth is that if you are already using HeavyJob in the field, you should be able to experience the freedom that HeavyJob can provide for your payroll department.
Taking a step back, how did you feel when you realized that HeavyJob diaries could provide a clear picture of your job site on any given day? What was your response when your field outperformed your budget because they could see their production and make changes immediately? Did your users want more? Did you dive into the HCSS Academy to learn how to improve any other aspect of your business?
Whether the euphoria was quick or slow to develop, if you had a plan in place to increase your use from basic to more advanced features of HeavyJob, the results should have maintained an upward trend that continues to maximize efficiency and protect your budget. The headaches of keying in the wrong numbers, and having to check numbers on spreadsheets for the budget can be alleviated. This kind of relief is the goal for your payroll.
HeavyBid is Where We Start
We start with HeavyBid because that this is where your job is born and won. A quick integration between your estimating budget and your accounting software will save you time. When you export your budget directly from HeavyBid to accounting, you reduce the extra work that you might spend creating a budget in a spreadsheet or having someone key it in manually, which is what we see many do that are not using this export.
You can also help your field users find the right codes to use and reduce their mistakes by spending time organizing and cleaning up your budget when creating cost codes. If you can make it easier in the field, you will have less to clean up when you are exporting to your accounting system. Take your time, get it right, and then make a process that you can repeat.
If you haven’t ever conformed an estimate for HeavyJob, I recommend taking this course:
Conforming the Estimate with Trackable Quantities in Mind
No More Missing Time
If you want your payroll completed on time, increase communication with your team before it becomes a problem. HCSS Field will reduce the time it takes to create and submit timecards, and it could be reasonable to expect time from the field to be submitted with regularity and on a schedule. This would leave room for the supervisors and engineers to check for the missing time, and ask for the changes or submissions in the field before it becomes an issue for payroll. Once it becomes the role of payroll to accept the timecards, here are a few tools to make sure time is not missing.
Time Card Management Tool: The time card management tool can be used when you are on any screen in HeavyJob. The side-drawer slides out, revealing a number of filters that can help you find time or missing time. You can also use the results to jump from job-to-job, saving you a few clicks in the process.
Comparing Schedules to Submitted Timecards: If you are using HCSS Dispatcher to schedule your crews, your foremen can simply pull in that crew to populate their employees and equipment for the day. In the office, you can compare your schedules to look for timecards that have not been submitted by the foreman.
Missing Time Cards Report: This simple report can search a date range for the time that is missing for an employee. This is especially helpful when the rapid growth of your company makes it difficult to keep track of everyone that needs to get paid.
Time Card Status Report: This report will show you whether the time card has been sent to payroll, who last modified the timecard, and if the timecard has been approved/reviewed/accepted.
Weekly Timecard – Active Jobs Report: This report along with the exceptions report inside the export to payroll are great tools to review employees across multiple jobs.
Employee Details Report (Advanced) – This report will list every employee record across jobs, and it can be exported to excel. It is not an editable record, but it can help you find every timecard within a specified date range considering all active jobs.
Overtime Tool – This is an easy way to organize your time cards based on a date range. This will allow you to group by the employee name, and then group by date if you want to make sure each employee has time for the week. You can also use this tool to quickly edit hours. This edit will create a revision directly on the time card without having to open the particular entry.
Export to Payroll – Do Not Manually Key in Timecards
I saved the most obvious tool for last because it is the most important. The Export to Payroll is the ultimate tool to enable the HeavyJob machine to pull your job information together, so your payroll people can focus on more important things.
With HeavyJob, the hours entered by the foremen can be the hours that end up on someone’s check. Payroll should not be manually entering hours directly in accounting. The work of accepting timecards and exporting them into the accounting system can be completed in as little as 5 minutes, and with easy repetition.
Changes can be handled quickly on the timecard, and re-exports can ignore the time that had already been exported. If you need help with any of the options in the export to payroll, click here for a search of support articles that can guide you. If you need additional help, call our support that is available every day.
The Export to Payroll will work with almost all major accounting systems, and if you change systems you can quickly modify the export to work with your new accounting. We recommend running a test for a small range of timecards to ensure the system is receiving the proper information. You should never need to manipulate the file or data from HeavyJob, it should export and import seamlessly. If not, let us know.
For those unique cases where your accounting requires a little more work than you are able to get from the export to payroll, we have a department that recognizes that there are a lot of pretty creative and unique requests that need to be resolved as custom work. Reach out to us if you need help with a custom solution.
For a full-screen version of this video click Here
Learn for Free, and Build Community
Your payroll HeavyJob users that have HCSS credentials logins should have access to hundreds of courses in the HCSS Academy. I encourage you to interact with the HCSS Learning team within the Academy and let us know what courses you want us to expand. Working at the HCSS Support desk for over 5 years has taught me one important lesson – Payroll asks good questions that are forwarding to the business. I encourage you to use the HCSS Community to ask questions of others in your industry and find out how they are overcoming their business problems. Most likely, there is a solution to your problem. If you need help along the way, call HCSS Support, and we can get you answers.
