Monitask blog

A timesheet error is a difference between hours worked and hours recorded. The expensive ones are small and regular rather than large and rare: 6 minutes a day costs $27,500.00 a year across 50 people at $22.00 an hour, and amounts to 1.25% of a 40-hour week — below the threshold any practical review would…

The timesheet approval process is the set of steps between an employee recording hours and those hours reaching payroll: submission, review, correction, approval and period close. The deadline is not chosen, it is counted backwards from pay date. The review is not a matter of diligence, it is a matter of how many hours the…

Contractor time tracking records hours against work rather than against a schedule. The distinction matters beyond bookkeeping: the IRS asks whether a business controls “or has the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job,” so a system that sets a contractor’s hours is itself a factor….

The Defense Contract Audit Agency issues no timekeeping regulation. The requirements come from the contract: DFARS 252.242-7006(c)(9) and (c)(10) require a timekeeping system that identifies labor by cost objective and a labor distribution system that charges direct and indirect labor correctly. Everything else called a “DCAA requirement” is audit practice derived from those two criteria…

An employee monitoring policy is a written document that tells employees what the employer monitors, why, where, how long the data is kept and who can see it. Four states — New York, Delaware, Connecticut and Maine — require notice before monitoring begins, each by a different mechanism, and two of those four laws changed…

Agency time tracking exists to answer one question: did the fee cover the work. A $12,000 monthly retainer at a $120 target rate funds 100 hours. Deliver 128 and the effective rate drops to $93.75, with 28 hours of over-servicing worth $3,360. Hours by client, by role and by activity are what turn a retainer…

A project management dashboard shows the few numbers that tell you whether a project will finish on time and on budget. The core set is schedule variance, cost variance, the schedule and cost performance indexes, and a forecast of final cost. All four come from three inputs: the budget, the percentage of work actually complete,…

Updated 15 October 2026 Reliable employee tracking software. Clear visibility and insights into how employees work. Even remotely.Try Monitask free for 10 days Attendance tracking records when people start, break and finish, so hours, lateness and absence are accurate. The method matters less than two things most guides skip: separating protected absences from countable ones,…

Decimal hours express minutes as a fraction of an hour: 8 hours 12 minutes becomes 8.20, not 8.12. Divide the minutes by 60 and add the result to the whole hours. Payroll systems need decimal hours because pay is hours multiplied by a rate, and 8:12 cannot be multiplied. Entering 8:12 as 8.12 shorts the…

The best time tracking software for consultants records time against a client and a project, separates billable from non-billable hours, and turns approved time into an invoice without re-entry. Beyond those three, the choice depends on how you bill: hourly work needs billing increments, retainers need a running balance, and fixed-fee work needs an effective…

Job costing calculates the total cost of one specific job by adding three figures: direct materials, direct labor at a burdened rate, and an allocated share of overhead. A $28 hourly wage costs roughly $40 once employer benefits are included, so job costs built on base wages run about 12% low. Contractors, agencies, manufacturers and…

Reliable employee tracking software. Clear visibility and insights into how employees work. Even remotely.Try Monitask free for 10 days The category name covers two very different products. At one end, software that counts keyboard and mouse activity during scheduled hours and takes periodic screenshots. At the other, software that logs the content of what is…