C&P ASAP User Guide: Productivity Reports
Productivity reports use time sheets to show how the shop's time is spent.

These reports are the best way see how people work -- by client, job, or task. Productivity reports show the hours, cost amounts, and billable amounts for both billable and non-billable hours, so you’ll see a complete picture of your work.

Productivity reports show time by work date. Like time reports, productivity reports show hours from time cards and time sheets. But unlike time reports, productivity reports only show totals -- so you won’t see individual time entries. This makes productivity reports much more concise (and probably more usable) than time reports.

Productivity reports don’t show billings. They’re less concerned with how the time was billed (or not billed) than with how the time was actually spent, since the cost of your staff is mostly fixed (unless they’re freelancers, that is). One reason for printing productivity reports is to see how time is being used, and especially if is it being managed properly. One of the reasons to track productivity is to ensure that the right people work on the right clients (i.e., the higher-paid staffers should only work on the most profitable clients, etc.).

Productivity reports can also help you balance your work load. If one staff member is consistently logging more hours than other staff, you’ll see it in their total hours -- they’ll be higher than others. You can use this information to move work around, so that everyone is working more efficiently.

Time reports vs. productivity reports

Productivity reports show time in summary, while time reports show time in detail. Productivity reports are designed to give managers a clear idea of how the staff spends their time over a week, month, quarter, or year.

Time reports, in contrast, are designed for day-to-day time accountability. Time reports show every time entry, including a lot of extra information (like rates and descriptions) that is interesting but not meaningful to management. For productivity purposes, time reports simply show too much detail. Time reports are ideal, however, for seeing time before billing. Since time reports show the time entry’s detail, they give you enough information to intelligently decide what to bill -- and what not to bill.

Tips for tracking staff productivity

Productivity reports for a long time period can take some time to print, depending on the quantity of time sheets selected.

Print productivity weekly to analyze how everyone managed their time.

The cost and billable amounts are totaled from time sheets using the task’s or staff member’s cost and billing rates. If someone’s cost or billable amounts seem strange, print a time report for the same range for work dates to see the time details. If you print both reports for the same time period, their totals will equal.

The cost and billable totals on productivity reports combine the different rates used on the staffer’s time sheets. Your billable totals will reflect different rates for different tasks on time sheets added for the selected time period.

To print productivity reports

1 Choose Productivity from the Snapshots menu.

The Productivity Reports page opens.

2 Enter a date range.

3 Select a report, then click Print.