Forum Discussion
Project schedule
If you have the backup data, the daily travel schedules or whatever, would you be willing to post that? I think that what you really want is not only possible, but more desirable, as you seem to be saying yourself.
Let me ask: is this single page something you do for each individual to somehow represent a year's worth of work hours? If not that, what is it? What do these numbers represent? What's the reality behind them?
I ask not to pry, but because of my background in HR and payroll systems. But also, maybe even more so, because of my desire to design spreadsheets that make sense. And you seem to be saying that the way you've been doing things doesn't totally make sense. Please forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you on that; I'm just trying to make sense of this.
It's essentially used to determine yearly costs for each department.
I am not able to post the travel schedule but this really the meat of the information that I need to generate, everything else is secondary and has to be entered manually.
I'm going to try one more time to make sense of all this.
- It sounds like what you're doing is more for budget planning purposes. Is that correct?
- If that is the case, then the way you're doing it--which from your sample just involves manually entering numbers that definitely are rough estimates--seems fine. You could consider using more accurate fractional hours (e.g., 48.6; or use 48 for five months, 49 for seven) that would get you much closer to the 1750 total.
- Do you even need monthly figures (given that in your sample spreadsheet they vary not a whit, what's the value of showing them?!!)?
- If, on the other hand, you want to report reality--i.e., have true/actual data, which you seem to wish were the case--then it could be linked to the actual employee hours, and start to actually reflect that reality. But as it is, you are just juggling numbers to come up with a pre-determined total, and if that's what you've been asked to do, the way you're already doing it is as good as any other. Why quibble the small stuff?
Again, I'm probing this because from all you've said, what you have presented us with (at least from my perspective as a former HR/Payroll database manager) first needs to be addressed from the perspective of policy and practice; only later as an Excel question. Are we reflecting reality or primarily coming up with budgeting estimates? Either is legitimate, but which is it? Keep them separate.
mathetes you are correct in that these are projections but when the time comes they are used to compare our actual expenses by, by month/ by category. Because things change so quickly the numbers do change on a monthly or even weekly basis depending so having something that can easily update number of hours would be really helpful. We do track actuals. Let me know if it can be done. Thanks.
- It sounds like what you're doing is more for budget planning purposes. Is that correct?