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Customer: Liaison Resources
Problem: Each week, Liaison employees faxed their timesheets back to HQ, a process that took too much time.
Solution: We built Liaison a custom timesheet application.

Liaison Resources has built a fantastic practice providing graphic design outsourcing for various Fortune 500 firms. However, the very nature of their work meant having employees at distributed client sites. They employ copywriters, designers, developers, system admins, marketing specialists, and many other professionals.

Every week, these employees would fax their timesheets back to headquarters, where one person would spend several hours logging time, checking errors, deciphering bad handwriting, checking project codes against a printed list, and sending the data through a scrubber and into the payroll and invoicing system.

We worked very closely with Dave Claunch, CEO of Liaison Resources. His requirements were pretty straightforward:

• A web-based system, because he had contractors all across Austin who needed to get in and log their time.
• The system had to keep employees from doing things they shouldn’t. For instance, they shouldn’t be able to log general overhead time or vacation time as overtime. Nor should they be able to log overtime before they’d worked 40 hours in a given week. Time that was logged for a job had to meet other criteria–it had to be a valid job, for instance, with a valid work order.
• Managers had to approve timesheets before they were routed to headquarters, but employees had the ability to send in their timesheets in case the manager was in meetings or out sick.
• The timesheet coordinator back at headquarters needed to be able to run reports on different data, collate and export timesheet data, purge records after exporting, and centrally manage important data like valid jobs, managers, and staff for each location.

Our timesheet collector was built in PHP 4 and mySQL 3.23 and deployed in early 2003, where it served the needs of 40+ employees and contractors. Before the system was installed, the timesheet administrator would routinely spend 10-15 hours a week running down timesheets. With a more automated process in place, this time was cut down to 2-3 hours per week. Which meant that the timesheet administrator was free to work on other, billable, tasks.

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