Suomen Talomestarit: timesheets that also show the worksite
At Suomen Talomestarit Oy the questions were simple: where was the employee, and for how long. The answer came from mobile clock-ins that can also record the location of the work.
- hours24 team
Suomen Talomestarit Oy is a Finnish construction company that mainly does house renovations and building projects. The crew moves from site to site: one address in the morning, another in the afternoon, a third the next day. In a single day one employee may have several worksites and several customers, each paying for exactly the time spent on their site.
A shared pain point of construction work and customer communication
For invoicing, a number of hours alone is no longer enough. The customer wants to know who was there, where, when and for how long. “Employee X worked 6 hours at site Y” sounds credible, but when the customer asks for details, someone has to be able to show it.
There were too many calls along the lines of “where are you working right now?”. Every such call interrupts both the employee and the office. And if a customer asks afterwards whether the worker was on their site at the agreed time, the site manager has to either remember or ask around.
One location, one timestamp, one employee on the same row. When both parties look at the same record, many invoicing discussions never need to happen.
Location is recorded with the clock-in
In hours24, saving the location is a setting, not an automatic default. When it is switched on, the device location is recorded together with the mobile clock-in. The employee opens the app and clocks in, the phone gets a position in the background, and a second entry is saved on leaving. If the position is not reliable enough, the location can stay empty and the entry is saved without it.
When the location has been saved, the timesheet tells two things on one row: duration and place. When preparing an invoice, the site manager has ready rows to work from instead of assembling a table from memory and phone calls. The site manager passes the information to the customer as a report or an export. hours24 has no automatic customer channel.
Working time records are not optional
In Finland an employer must keep records of hours worked and the compensation paid for them, and must provide the records on request to the occupational safety and health authority and to the employees' representative (Working Time Act 872/2019, section 32). In construction, shared worksites add their own duties: a visible photo ID with a tax number and a site-specific list of workers (Occupational Safety and Health Act 738/2002, sections 52 a and 52 b).
When the clock-in is done on a phone at the site and the entry is linked to the right job straight away, the same data generally serves three needs at once: the customer invoice, payroll and statutory working time records. An Excel sheet put together afterwards serves none of them equally well.
Privacy is not a problem when the system is honest
The most common doubt about location is that it feels like surveillance to the employee. In practice it is often the other way round. When the entry shows where the work was done, it also protects the employee: the customer cannot later claim that nobody was seen on site, and nobody needs to phone the employee to ask “where are you now?”. If someone claims a figure on the timesheet is wrong, the record exists.
In a normal mobile clock-in the location is recorded at the moment of clocking. Features that use continuous positioning, such as geofence-based automatic clock-in, are enabled separately and are not on by default.
Hours makes it easier to agree timesheets with customers. We can show that the employee has been on site, because the software records the location of the work done. We no longer need to call employees and ask where they are at any given time.
What to take away from this story
If your business depends on the customer seeing and approving the work done, a paper timesheet is no longer enough. Location turns the timesheet into a document that is easier to go through together with the customer.
In construction, the value of a timesheet is measured by how few questions it raises later: in the invoicing meeting, in payroll and in an inspection. Location, timestamp and site on the same row answer some of them in advance.
Source: Working Time Act 872/2019, section 32, working time records (Finlex, in Finnish)
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