It seems that the cost of services and SLA’s are the ‘hot topic’ at the moment.  Is it ‘the annual budget season’ that brings this flurry of activity?  Is it the increasing demand, on the part of shared service ‘customers’, to know exactly what it is they are paying for?  Maybe, driven by dissatisfaction with charges based upon last year’s allocation plus 5%?

‘Time recording’ is the obvious answer, but can organisations sell ‘time recording’ to their staff?  It seems the answer is yes, providing it is team-based.  The idea is that the teams themselves use the results to change working practices, offer options to their customers and generate process improvement ideas.  Time recording should appeal to even those who are not ready to abandon fixed charging; after all we need information about resource deployment to identify opportunities for process improvement and to benchmark performance.

Time and Task is a web-based, time-recording tool with integrated benchmarking.  Designed specifically for Finance & Accounting operations the tool has pre-templated tasks from Score Research’s benchmarking and process mapping database.  Staff can assign extra information, such as customer and account code, at the task level.

Currently being trialled by FASSBEX programme members ‘Time and Task’ looks set for wide adoption.  With a ‘pay-as-you-use pricing’ model that avoids up-front licencing costs, no ongoing maintenance costs and no resident software the usual ‘barriers to entry’ are avoided.  Users can be up and running and seeing results in days.

For more details read the brochure in ADOBE format

and/or visit www.timeandtask.net