Work Hours

When used correctly, work hours give you good visibility of where you are with each job.

You can enter more or fewer of the hours that you have estimated to the client into a workflow. This enables you to hold a bit back or to allocate more time if the job requires more time than expected.

Example

Line Number	Estimated Hours	Work Hours
1	10	20:00
2	50	40:00

In line 1, a task was estimated to take 10 hours. It is later estimated to require 20 hours. Setting the work hours to 20 allows:

• The revised estimate to be recoded once, as opposed to coming up on a daily exception report.
• The scheduler to know that more time must be allocated.
• The forecast job profit to be adjusted downwards (if the line is set to—Fee—that is, a fixed price).

In line 2, only 40 of the 50 hours of the task have been entered into the workflow. This allows:

• The task owner to hold something back.
• The scheduler to know that he or she is to schedule only 40 hours.
• The forecast profit on the job to be revised upward.