Running projects with the best people is excellent. If you're in a group of companies, you likely have access to a broad range of expertise across the companies.
What is not so great for many companies working in groups is the administration—getting and maintaining an overview of who borrowed which resource for which projects and how many hours you have to charge between the companies.
In this article, we examine some of the issues related to borrowing resources from each other and examine a solution that allows companies to spend less time on resource administration.
1. The different companies in our group use different time tracking systems
The first scenario is widespread. When the different companies in a group work with other time tracking solutions, any resources loaned out between companies need login details for two different systems and must make duplicate entries.
Despite the parallel data entries, the company that has loaned out its employees still doesn’t have complete control over the situation, so the company loaning the person has to report back. It’s a complicated process that naturally takes time.
Learn more about how TimeLog saves you from logging in to multiple systems and duplicating work.
This is also a common scenario in group setups. You have a giant system that deals with resource loans between group companies – but it’s still hard to work with because the system was designed for the finance department and the CFO without considering the people who have to report their hours.
Setting up the rules for loaning resources takes time, and registering the time worked by the person who was loaned out is often not user-friendly.
This was previously accepted as the norm, but more and more people are beginning to ask why they have to work in such an awful system. Moreover, it costs the company a lot of administrative time.
This scenario isn’t overly common in large groups, but also not unknown. It's inconvenient and time-consuming to administrate resource loans between companies in Excel.
If you recognise your situation in any of these three scenarios, here comes the good news: There is a way to cut down on the administration, and the solution even comes with a guaranteed return on investment (ROI).
TimeLog presents a versatile system that can handle processes such as time registration, project management and invoice processing. And the really smart aspect is that all companies in your group can use the same system, even if you work with different finance and payroll systems. This makes it incredibly easy to handle the administration associated with resource loans within the group.
You – or one of TimeLog’s consultants – can set up some simple rules for how to deal with resource loans in the system, and there are even several pre-set rules to choose from.
“Once the rules have been defined, the system takes care of everything else. For example, TimeLog automatically calculates how much income you can book to the loaned resources.”
Exactly how much time you can save by using TimeLog to administrate resource loans varies from one group to the next. But most of our major customers state that they have more than covered the cost of investing in TimeLog through saved working hours.
TimeLog also helps with more than “just” the administration resource loans between companies. For example, it provides a complete project management toolbox, and you can automate the preparation of invoices and salary payments.
Moreover, you can track your business in real-time and at different levels. How are things going for company A, company B and company C – and for the group as a whole? And how about for the individual projects? The insight and control that TimeLog offers can help you develop your group and make it even