Timesheets and Billing for Engineering and Contractors
4castplus is a robust Time & Expense Tracking solution with integrated Customer Billing that has been built to handle the multifaceted needs of construction and engineering.
The Cutting Edge of Time Tracking
On top of a rich feature set, 4castplus Time & Billing has been designed to work in harmony with the project management and cost controls features integral to 4castplus. Businesses worldwide have discovered the enormous value and convenience of having a unified solution.
Project Managers, Engineers, Field Staff, Crews, Contractors, etc. need an easy-to-use and centralized place to track their billable and non-billable time. 4castplus has intelligent workflows that piece this all together for full 360 degree reporting and management of projects.
“The 4castplus timesheet system is the easiest I’ve ever used. Our people actually like entering their time. On top of that, its connections with controls and procurement all make it tremendously powerful.”
Simply Smarter
With its 3-step timesheet interface, this tracking system is so quick and easy-to-use, daily entry can be completed in less than a minute. And with its intelligent predictive and auto clean-up features, staff and data entry people will save valuable time. Record notes/comments for each item entry including assumptions, issues or collaborative messages.
4castplus provides many configurable features designed to significantly increase the accuracy of time entry. Such as: min and max hours, composite rates, task assignments, optional mandatory comments, carry-forward, visualizations, self-serve reporting, and much more.
Invoice Customers Immediately and Accurately
Every billable entry into a 4castplus timesheet is integrated tightly with 4castplus Invoicing. Save valuable time and reduce errors – 4castplus billing is easy to use and super quick to create invoices. No need to sync data or copy information from one place to the next; it’s all tightly tied together for a fully closed-loop application. Gain immediate insight into Billed-To-Date, WIP, profitability and cash flow.
Stress-free Approvals
4castplus has multiple levels of built-in approvals to easily oversee and control that the time captured is both correct and going to the right place. 4castplus also includes approval debottlenecking tools to ensure cost and billable entries are efficiently processed and not stuck in approval queues. Approvers are provided a clean and easy-to-use interface that gives them all the information they need to approve, modify or reject timesheet entries.
Track Multiple Roles per Person
Many organizations have employees that function in multiple roles. With 4castplus, many roles can be setup for a labor resource – and the correct cost & billing rates will follow accordingly. You may, for example, have a billable employee that is both a Structural Engineer and is also a Project Manager. You can configure this employee as both and he/she can select the applicable role when entering time on the timesheet.
Manage Complex Rate Structures
With 4castplus, you can create unlimited billing rate structures called “Rate Tables”, and apply unique rate tables to any project or task. Each rate table can hold a full database of rates for your labor, equipment and materials charge-out costs. You can create unique units of measure for any resource type. You can setup rates such as: hourly, daily, lump sum, overtime, and any other special rate unit you may need for your organization.
4castplus is unique in that it allows you to separate your resources from their discipline, allowing you to decouple your people from their roles – and the system will easily manage the associated cost and billing rates.
Track to any Project Task or Cost Code in the Work Breakdown Structure
4castplus supports a full Work Breakdown Structure hierarchy for project management and tracking. Time entry can be done at any level or cost code in the WBS. Explicit task assignments and timesheet access control is easily configured to manage who sees what task on their timesheet.
Client Billing Codes
In 4castplus, you can take advantage of the flexible Billing Profile feature which allows you to configure cost codes that match the requirements of your clients. This is separated from the internal cost code management which allows you to structure your own internal cost codes for your reporting needs.
Direct Accounting Integration
All entries into 4castplus tracking modules can be synchronized with most any accounting system or ERP (MS Dynamics, Sage, SAP, Oracle, Quickbooks to name a few). Synchronize 4castplus codes with GL codes, sub ledger, AP, AR. Data can be aggregated to any cost code or WBS level. Accounting integration reduces errors and saves valuable time – there’s just no need to touch this information more than once.
Labor Expenses
With 4castplus, you can finally replace that Excel-based expense form with a robust and configurable labor expense management solution. At the same time and place as entering their timesheet, your staff can also enter reimbursable expenses. You can pre-configure the expense categories and cost codes and whether the reimbursable method is through payroll or accounts payable. All the expense transactions are optionally subject to electronic approval, and available for billing in the Customer Invoicing module. They’re also logged on the project as cost and/or revenue for full project reporting. A formatted Excel report can be produced in a single click so that you can continue to support current processes.
Banked Time, Vacation and Overtime Management
4castplus provides built-in support for creating “Banks” for management of HR-related details such as Vacation, and Banked Time (time-in-lieu). Eliminate the painful hours spent in figuring out your staff’s banked, vacation or overtime hours. You can setup the policy to either bank overtime or pay overtime. You can configure your banked time policy that reflects your local regulatory standards, and apply that globally for all your employees. You can override these rules on a per-employee basis for those that fall outside the standard. Banked time is automatically calculated as the user enters time each day/week. Users can access reports on their banked time balance, and draw-down from their bank as needed.
Cloud-Based: Available Anywhere
4castplus timesheets are all web-based, in the cloud and available anywhere. Data can be entered from the field, from the office, on the road, etc. All the data is centrally managed and cost information is continuously calculated for full real-time reporting on costs and revenues.
Multiple Billing Methods
4castplus supports Hourly Billable, Fixed Price, Unit Price and Cost Plus billing methods. You can even mix multiple billing structures in the same project. Many organizations face the need to break up their project into some Hourly and some Lump Sum in the same project – no problem for 4castplus.
Control Measures Built-In
4castplus provides several controls to give you the peace of mind that time is being entered according to your business rules.
- You can optionally configure daily limits on number of hours
- You can optionally enforce mandatory comments
- You can optionally enforce a minimum hours per week. This is valuable for utilization metrics.
- You can restrict access to only those tasks the person is assigned to
Report on Labor Utilization
With 4castplus, you can track to billable and non-billable tasks – including overhead tasks such as for vacation, sick time and stat holidays. In fact, 4castplus tracks a lot more about each of your resources: including available hours, expenses and banked time. With all of this information, you can gather some pretty impressive metrics about all of your employee and contract staff. Metrics such as:
- Labor Utilization
- Billable Utilization
- Available Hours
- Total Margin per person over a date range
- Realized Billable
- Invoiced Hours
- And a lot more
Tracking to Rollup Tasks
When designing the work breakdown structure for a project, it’s critical to be mindful of which levels of the WBS you want to track your hours and costs. On complex projects, there can be hundreds of activities and multiple levels. 4castplus provides users with a variety of tools to restrict the number of tasks on the WBS that can be accessed from the timesheet. One of these tools is the ability to create Rollup Workpackages with Sub-tasks as Deliverables. This is an extremely powerful way to enable you to create a very detailed WBS without cluttering the timesheets. The sub-deliverable layer is a powerful utility for progressing and budgeting, which gets summarized up to the Rollup for tracking and EVM measurements.
Timekeeper
4castplus has a “Timekeeper” module for users to enter time on behalf of others. This can be used by admin staff or by jobsite staff.
Management Overrides
Permissioned users can override any timesheet entry. This is critical for last-minute tweaks of billable amounts going to clients. Modify quantity, rate, comments, and task of any timesheet entry.
Track any unit of measure
With 4castplus, you can configure many tracking rate types. You can track Daily, Hourly, Weekly, percent of progress, lump sum or anything else you can think of.