Automate, Track And Manage Complex Time And Billing Processes

Consulting Services Inc. (CSI), named an Inc500 fastest growing company in 2009, is an IT, advisory, engineering and professional services firm serving government and commercial clients throughout the US. CSI had been using a payroll company to manage time and attendance, but they were quickly outgrowing this solution. The payroll company"s offering was a generic, catch-all system and with CSI"s growth, they needed a more flexible, robust solution that could manage specific contracts requiring unique terms. CSI had numerous government contracts that required individual project billing, so they needed a multi-tiered system that allowed different terms for each project and could manage complex overtime scenarios in multiple states.

The biggest problem with the system was its inability to automatically manage overtime. This process was extremely time consuming and required the employees to manually record compensatory time and overtime. There was a significant amount of time and effort spent on back-end checking and updating. Employees were always questioning adjustments that were made to their time and it was a tremendous burden on staff to re-enter data, answer questions and provide sufficient communication back to the employee to ensure time was recorded correctly. There was no way to customize or manage budgeted hours so the company was not able to limit the amount of time spent on a project or budget the time properly. And there was a lack of trust in the process overall.

CSI chose CSDP because of their ability to take their existing software and customize it to design a solution to meet CSI"s specific needs rather than trying to make an off-the-shelf product work for their needs. CSDP implemented a customized time and attendance system that is the core of CSI"s business. The contracting portion of the system manages even the most complicated contract requirements and the billing data is automatically fed into the existing accounting system to manage invoicing and payroll.

Previously, one of CSI"s biggest challenges was managing overtime and comp time. Now, when hours are entered into CSDP"s software, the system automatically checks the time against the contract and allocates the appropriate number of hours to the contract and any remaining time to comp time.