TO: All Your Agency Staff
FROM: Your Agency Management
DATE: September 2026
RE: Accurate and Timely Time Entry in Workamajig
Accurate timekeeping is an important part of how Your Agency operates its business.
The purpose of this memo is not simply to remind everyone to complete a timesheet. It is to explain why accurate time entry matters, what Your Agency needs from each employee, and how we will use Workamajig to make the process easier and more accurate.
Time entered into Workamajig becomes part of the financial and operating information used to manage the agency. If the underlying time information is incomplete or inaccurate, many of the reports and decisions that follow from it will also be incomplete or inaccurate.
1. Why Accurate Time Entry Matters
Your Agency needs to understand how much time it actually takes to service its clients and complete its work.
Accurate time information allows us to measure and manage:
• Client and project profitability;
• Actual hours incurred compared with project estimates and budgets;
• Employee utilization and workload;
• Agency capacity and staffing requirements;
• Project overruns;
• Unbilled time;
• Write-offs;
• The profitability of individual services and types of work;
• Future project estimates and client fee arrangements; and
• Overall agency financial performance.
Timesheets are therefore not simply an accounting exercise. They are one of the primary sources of management information used to understand where the agency's resources are being spent and whether Your Agency is being appropriately compensated for the work it performs.
2. Record the Time Actually Worked
All employees are expected to record the actual amount of time spent performing their work. Do not change, reduce, or omit time because:
• A project is already over budget;
• You believe too much time has already been charged to a job;
• You think the client will not pay for the additional time;
• The work only took a few minutes;
• You are uncertain whether the time will ultimately be billed; or
• You believe the time should be absorbed by Your Agency.
Those are separate management, project management, and accounting decisions. Your responsibility is to accurately record what happened.
Your job is to record the time. Management's job is to decide what we do with it.
A timesheet should reflect the actual resources required to perform the work - not what we hoped or budgeted the work would require.
If a project was estimated to require 20 hours but actually required 30 hours, Your Agency needs to know that it required 30 hours. Recording only 20 hours does not make the project more profitable. It simply prevents us from seeing the true economics of the project and makes it more difficult to estimate, price, and manage similar work in the future.
3. Time Must Be Charged to the Correct Client and Project
Whenever possible, time should be entered against the specific client, project and task associated with the work being performed.
Time should not routinely be placed into a general Your Agency or miscellaneous job simply because it is easier than identifying the correct project. Doing so prevents Your Agency from understanding the true cost of servicing a client or completing a particular project.
If you worked on a client project, the time belongs to that client project. If you cannot locate the appropriate project or task in Workamajig, please raise the issue rather than selecting an unrelated or generic code.
4. Small Amounts of Time Still Matter
Many of your Agency employees work across multiple clients and projects during the course of a day. This can involve a number of relatively short activities:
• Reviewing an email;
• Responding to a client question;
• Reviewing creative;
• Participating in a short meeting;
• Preparing or reviewing billing;
• Making a project adjustment;
• Providing internal direction;
• Speaking with another team member about a client; and
• Reviewing schedules, estimates, or project information.
Individually, these activities may appear insignificant. Collectively, however, they can represent a substantial amount of employee time. If those hours are not captured, Your Agency understates the actual resources required to service its clients.
The fact that an activity takes only a few minutes does not mean that the time has no value.
Minimum time entry for short tasks. Consistent with common agency timekeeping practice, Your Agency uses a minimum time-entry increment of 0.25 hours (15 minutes) for an individual job or task. When work on a particular client, project, or task takes less than 15 minutes, 0.25 hours should be entered to the appropriate job and task code.
This is particularly important for employees who move between many jobs during the day. A series of five- or ten-minute emails, calls, reviews, approvals, or other project touches can represent a meaningful amount of agency effort. The 0.25-hour minimum ensures that these short activities are not lost simply because each one, viewed in isolation, was brief.
Example: If you spend 8 minutes responding to a client email on Job A and later spend 12 minutes reviewing creative on Job B, each activity should be recorded as 0.25 hours against its respective job/task. Do not combine or “dump” these short client activities into a general Your Agency code.
5. Enter Time as Close to the Work as Possible
Employees are strongly encouraged to enter time daily and as close as reasonably possible to when the work occurs.
Reconstructing an entire week's activities from memory at the end of the week makes it much easier to:
• Forget shorter activities;
• Understate time;
• Charge time to the wrong project;
• Use a generic project rather than the correct project; or
• Estimate rather than accurately record the time worked.
Daily time entry should significantly improve the accuracy of our information and make completing timesheets considerably easier.
6. New Workamajig Feature - “Default Projects Touched Today”
Your Agency has enabled a Workamajig feature designed to make time entry easier for employees who work across numerous projects during the day.
The setting is called “Default Projects Touched Today.”
When enabled, Workamajig can automatically display projects that you interacted with during the day on your timesheet. For employees who move frequently between projects, this can provide a useful reminder of the work performed that day and reduce the likelihood that time will be forgotten.
Each employee will be shown how to activate and use this feature as part of our upcoming Workamajig timesheet training. The feature is intended to assist with time entry. Employees remain responsible for reviewing their timesheet and ensuring that the time entered is complete and accurate.
7. Appropriate Task Codes
Using the correct project is important, but using the appropriate task or activity code is also important.
Task-level information allows Your Agency to understand not only how much a project costs, but what activities are consuming those resources.
For example, time associated with account management, creative, production, billing, project management, or another function should be recorded using the appropriate available task. This information becomes particularly useful when Your Agency compares actual project performance with estimates and develops estimates for future work.
Where the appropriate task is unavailable, please speak with your project manager or the appropriate Workamajig administrator rather than selecting an unrelated task simply to complete the entry.
8. Project Setup Must Support Accurate Time Entry
Accurate timesheets also depend upon projects being established correctly.
Employees who are expected to work on a project must have access to the appropriate project and tasks in Workamajig. This applies not only to employees performing the primary client work but also to employees performing supporting functions.
For example, where Accounting will be required to perform client-specific billing or other project work, the appropriate accounting resource should be assigned to the project so that the related time can be recorded against the correct job.
Project managers and those responsible for project setup therefore have an important role in making accurate timekeeping possible.
9. Over-Budget Projects and Write-Offs
There is an important distinction between time incurred and time ultimately billed or recovered from a client.
Employees should record all time actually incurred. If a project subsequently requires a write-off, that write-off will be reviewed separately through Your Agency's project and accounting processes.
Employees should not attempt to manage project profitability through their timesheets. An over-budget project is valuable information. It may indicate:
• The original estimate was too low;
• The scope of work changed;
• Additional client requests were received;
• Additional revisions were required;
• Internal inefficiencies occurred;
• The project required more senior resources than expected;
• Scope changes were not identified or billed; or
• The client's fee structure should be reconsidered.
Management cannot address these issues if the actual time is not recorded.
10. Internal and Non-Client Time
Not every working hour will necessarily be chargeable to a client. Internal meetings, administration, training, business development and other agency activities are legitimate uses of employee time.
These hours should also be accurately recorded using the appropriate Your Agency internal project or activity.
Accurate non-client time is important because it allows Your Agency to understand the difference between:
• Client-service time;
• Business development;
• Administration;
• Training;
• Internal agency initiatives; and
• Other non-client activities.
A complete picture of both client and non-client time is necessary to properly understand employee utilization and agency capacity.
11. Do Not “Dump” Time Into a General Your Agency Job
A general Your Agency or internal job should only be used when the work genuinely relates to an internal Your Agency activity.
It should not become a default location for time simply because:
• The appropriate project is difficult to find;
• The employee worked on many projects that day;
• The employee cannot remember which client received the work;
• The project has exceeded its budget; or
• Completing the detailed time entry would take additional effort.
Doing so shifts client-related costs away from the client and makes both the client project and Your Agency's internal costs inaccurate.
12. Everyone’s Time Matters
The timekeeping policy applies regardless of role.
For Your Agency to obtain reliable information, the agency needs to capture the time of everyone contributing to client and agency work. If an employee performs work but no time is recorded, Workamajig effectively treats that work as though it required no resources.
That can significantly distort project profitability and agency performance.
13. What to Do When You Are Unsure
We recognize that there will be situations where the correct time entry is not immediately obvious. If you are uncertain, do not guess and do not simply use a miscellaneous project. Please ask. Examples might include:
• The project does not appear on your timesheet;
• You cannot locate the appropriate task;
• You worked across several projects during one activity;
• A project appears to be closed;
• You performed client work that was not anticipated when the project was created; or • You are unsure whether an activity is client or internal time.
It is much easier to correct the setup at the time the work occurs than to reconstruct the activity several weeks or months later.
14. The Principle We Want Everyone to Remember
The purpose of timekeeping is accurate data capture.
We are not asking employees to decide whether an hour is profitable, billable, recoverable or within budget.
We are asking employees to tell us accurately: What did you work on, and how much time did it actually take?
Once Your Agency has accurate information, management can make informed decisions concerning budgets, staffing, pricing, billing, write-offs, and client relationships. Without accurate information, those decisions become considerably more difficult.
15. Staff Training
Your Agency will conduct a 30-minute all-staff Workamajig timesheet session to review these guidelines and demonstrate the recommended time-entry process.
The session will include:
• Why accurate timekeeping matters;
• Daily time-entry expectations;
• Selecting the correct client and project;
• Selecting the appropriate task;
• Using the “Default Projects Touched Today” feature;
• Handling short-duration activities;
• Recording internal and non-client time;
• What to do when a project or task is unavailable; and
• Questions from staff.
Our objective is to make accurate time entry a straightforward part of everyone's normal daily workflow.
16. Closing
Accurate timesheets benefit everyone at Your Agency.
They help the agency understand workloads, identify projects requiring attention, improve estimates, price future work appropriately, measure client profitability, and make better staffing and business decisions.
Most importantly, accurate timesheets allow Your Agency to manage based on what actually happened rather than incomplete information.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation and for helping us improve the quality of the information we use to run the agency.