The main topic of this blog post looks at how Shepherd users can bill their customers even if they pay their technicians based on shifts.
When you bill a company for work done, they are not especially concerned with your contracts with your employees. They just want to know that they are being billed for the work you have done for a service order—not more.
In this respect, one of the real beneficiaries of this added function is the technician since they are the ones who need to enter “shift started” and “shift ended” in the Shepherd app. Given that, for payroll purposes, the shift cannot be interrupted, it previously meant that individual work orders (used to bill customers) and in-office admin time (not billed and not working on work orders) all had to be then entered manually.
Automated Time Tracking: Reducing Errors and Extra Steps
What’s above spells a lot of extra steps, any one of which could have been an opportunity for a mistake and a headache to trace and amend. Now these gaps are completed automatically. Office hours, downtime, labor/work time, and travel time can be logged within an active shift period. As such the shift time is also calculated automatically, as a result of the total time period minus the various activities listed below. While shift time cannot be edited, the tally will readjust if one of those other entries is edited after the shift time has been completed.
Although this is the more significant improvement for this aspect of the system, there are others related to time entries that should also smooth out procedural bumps for those affected.
Blocking Premature Task Completion
The first is the option to block the action completed field until all tasks have been verifiably done to avoid any items being missed from the work order, thereby causing delays and disappointment. Prior to this being available, completing the time entry action was possible, even if tasks remained undone on the work order. This can still be possible, should the user want it but, if a technician has been prone to missing work items because of prematurely marking the time entry as done, this would force them to be more careful.
Another cause can be when technicians do their reporting in the office once the job is done, and with time entry at the top, this would be the first to toggle as done. Doing this first, followed by a call or a distraction could result in other parts of the report being overlooked and forgotten.
Adding Time for Additional Work
Another time-related refinement is connected with work time. A previous blog noted how technicians could add a work item to a work order based on what they found needed doing at site, rather than needing to raise an altogether new item and therefore a return visit. Now the same is true for adding time for a new work item, since some contracts require payment for time spent, rather than tasks performed.
Pausing Travel Time for Breaks or Supply Runs
The final example is another small enhancement. As described above and with the topmost example of recording shift work, some contracts may include travel time as billed time. If that is the case, it is understandable that the customer would not want to pay for what they see as delays or interruptions to the journey to the job site. Nonetheless, a technician may need to stop on the way. A rest stop or stopping for supplies that were not readily available in stock—after all it is better than abandoning or postponing the visit. However, there was previously no way to “pause” time for such events. That option now exists.
A technician can pause their journey time to take care of any reason for a stop, be it a comfort break, lunch, fuel, collecting items, or even a detour to another site along the way. Not having this would have meant clicking on “end travel time” which previously would have meant that “service time” would automatically start causing a domino effect of time entry corrections to be taken care of further down the line.
Once customers have moved passed the service selection and implementation phases of adopting Shepherd, it is often these smaller details that make the day-to-day use of Shepherd such a refreshing change, and a reminder that this was indeed the right choice for their operations. To experience that same sense of ongoing satisfaction, the first step is to book a demo to see Shepherd up close for yourself.
