Don't like...

In any corporation, one of the biggest outgoings is salary. If you talk to any corporate accountant or payroll master, and they'll tell you that alot of money goes towards people's salaries. Hence companies want to know what employees do, and hence timesheets feature quite commonly in the private sector of the corporate world.

I shouldn't really complain, because in many regards I have it easy. To hear a full rant, talk to any lawyer, clerk or accountant employed by a firm. They have to account for their time in as small as 5min increments, as it all gets billed to customers.

The reason for this, is that the clients who pay the money to a company for a service, often want an invoice so they can see where that money is going, and to give them a chance to see whether the costs are reasonable. You can understand it when you go shopping at the supermarket or take your car to the mechanic, as when you see a bill for a few hundred, then obviously you want to have a chance to make sure that no 'extras' are being slipped into that total.

So my company does the same. At the end of each day, I need to fill out a sheet detailing the time I spent on different tasks and different projects. My "cost" to the company is then recorded against each project so they can determine how much that project cost in the end.

Now where my gripes for this post come from, are that my role is odd. I'm like the courier that provides supplies to the office. I'm a necessary part that supports a number of teams on different projects to extend test automation, but I don't do any automation or test itself. So sometimes the work I do, supports several projects, and other times it is for stuff that isn't in the pipeline yet. Now from a project costing point of view, I'm an undesirable component, hence many projects that are tight on funds end up telling me to not bill to them. Way too many times, my timesheets get rejected by managers who don't want my costs on their project, even though my work that day may have benefited their team.

So I don't have to provide the fine resolution reporting that some people have to endure, but I do get the run-around alot when it comes to just filling that thing in.