Timesheets from the WhatsApp your crew already use

The Friday afternoon you already know

Nobody in construction has a timesheet problem. They have a collection problem. The men know what they worked. The information exists. It is just spread across a photograph, a voice note, a text at ten past six and somebody’s memory, and by the time it reaches the office it has been retyped twice and is a day late.

Every product built to fix this has asked the same thing of the crew: download an app, make an account, remember a password, and open it twice a day in the rain with gloves on. That is why the last one you tried died in the field rather than in the office. It did not die because the office stopped caring.

• Nothing to install. It is the WhatsApp already on the phone.
• Nothing to log into, so there is no password to forget on a Monday.
• No training. A lad sends a message the way he already sends messages.
• It works the same on a five year old handset as on a new one.

What a clock in actually is here

A worker sends a message to say he is on, and another to say he is off. He can type it, say it, or share his location from the WhatsApp attach menu. Whatever he sends becomes one event, and that event carries three things: the site it was matched to, the method it came in by, and how confident the system was about the match.

A location is telemetry, not a turnstile. A shared location tells you which of your sites a message most likely came from. It does not prove a man was standing there, and this product does not pretend otherwise. It is not a fraud control and it is not a gate on pay. Nothing a worker does or fails to do with his phone can stop him being paid for the hours you approve.

What you get instead is a record with the working out attached. Not a number somebody typed into a cell on Friday, but a day with the messages behind it, the site it resolved to and the way it was recorded, still readable in a week when somebody asks.

What comes out at the end of the week

A week per worker, built by code from those events. The hours are worked out, never typed in, so there is no version of this where the total and the days underneath it disagree. Under each week sit the days that made it, the rate that was in effect on each of them, and a plain sentence per day saying how the figure was arrived at.

You read it, and you approve it. That approval is the moment the week becomes a thing you have put your name to, and it is deliberately a human moment: nothing is approved on your behalf and nothing is paid because a phone did something clever. If you approve a week and then find out about a day off, you can reopen it, and you have to give a reason. The worker is told when you do.

Worked out by code

Hours, days, the rate in effect, the week total

Decided by a person

Whether the week is approved, and any correction to it

Kept either way

The events behind each day, and the reason a week was reopened

When a number is wrong

It will be wrong sometimes. A man forgets to send anything at all until Tuesday, or a shift runs into the night, or somebody was on the wrong site in the record and the right one in life. So the correction is a first-class part of this rather than a support ticket.

A worker can write, in his own words and in his own language, that Thursday should have been ten hours and not eight. That does not change anything. It reaches you as something to confirm, with the old figure and the new one side by side, and it is a change only once you say so. The office can raise exactly the same correction from a desk, and it is held by exactly the same limit: somebody has to agree to it before a number moves.

That rule is the whole design in one line. The system proposes, a person confirms, and only then does anything that touches money actually change.

The awkward bits, said out loud

Two things happen often enough that a page which does not mention them is hiding something.

A clock in the system was not sure about is accepted and flagged, never refused. Signal at a gate is bad, a location can land two hundred metres out, and a message can arrive in a form nothing recognises. Refusing one of those would leave a man unpaid over a phone mast, so it goes in, marked as uncertain, and you can see the ones worth a look. The flag is for you, not against him.

A shift nobody closed is closed by the system and marked provisional. People forget to clock out. Rather than leaving a shift running for three days, it gets closed and labelled as provisional, which is a way of saying that this one is the system’s guess and not the worker’s word. It shows on the week as exactly that, because a tidy number you cannot trust is worse than an untidy one you can.

If you want to see what the crew’s side of this looks like, there is a page written for them at what your crew see, in their words rather than yours. What to actually say to a man before his first message is in using WhatsApp for work.

The things people ask

What it costs

Everyone using it counts, managers and office staff too. Cancel whenever you like.