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Weekly Sheets

The Weekly Sheet is not used for managing your finance or your accounts but is the most important tool you can use to improve your business performance.

This is because it shows you clearly where you are spending your time and where you need to focus your efforts to make improvements.

We recommend that you make time every day to record your daily activities on the weekly sheet. If you do this every day it should take no more than a minute or two. Most people make it a part of their Daily Review. It is important to be reasonably accurate with what you are recording. We choose to record to the nearest 15 minute interval as this gives the best trade-off between accuracy and ease of recall.

Click on the video alongside to see a demonstration of the Weekly Sheets in action.

You are obviously free to customise the Activity codes as you choose for your business. If you choose to create a "catch all" or "dustbin" category where you record "Any other activities" then monitor it very closely. If it is regularly used to record a significant amount of time (say over 2 hours per week) then it should be split to capture the information more accurately. Regular use of an "Any other activities" category would negate the whole benefit of the process.

Examining your progress on a regular basis is time well spent as it quickly becomes apparent when you are spending too much time on certain activities. Often it can be a good idea to have someone else take a look at the data in your weekly sheets. If you would find that helpful then why not ask your mentor to examine it?

Most people would find it beneficial to give the weekly sheets a thorough examination during their Monthly Review. This is particularly helpful if you feel that your business is "getting stuck" at one particular level and not progressing to the sort of business you might like.

Some things to be watching out for

  1. Your percentage billable should be gradually increasing week on week. Not necessarily every single week but the general trend should be upwards. If it is not then you should examine the Total Hours you are spending and how effectively they are being spent.
  2. The number of hours that you work should have a direct bearing on your income. We are not advocating that you spend more time working than you want to. However, if you are finding that your Average Hourly Rate is lower than you want or reducing over time, then you need to decrease the number of hours you are spending on unbillable activities or increase the amount of time spent on Marketing your business.
  3. Look for areas that are taking up a lot of your time. If these are unbillable activities then consider ways that they can be reduced without affecting quality of service.
  4. Spend some time thinking about how much of the year you want to work. Edit the Weeks per Year value on the settings sheet to accurately reflect your plans. Some people come to a conclusion at some time that they want to work less weeks per year but retain the same income. Putting a representative figure in here and monitoring the Projected Annual Income Estimate will help you to keep to that plan throughout the working part of the year.

For those Consultants who are targeting Business Customers and are offering a System Administration service then it is often a good idea to use a copy of the Weekly Sheets as a time sheet for when you are on a customer site. Simply change the Activity Codes to represent the sorts of activity you are engaging in and hide the fields you do not want the customer seeing (Like the Projected Annual Income Estimate. Then print off the corresponding sheet at the end of each week and give it to your customer attached to your invoice. Unfortunately, the usual copyright stuff means that you would not be able to give your Customers a copy of this application.

The Weekly Sheet is designed to be simple to use. However, there is no such thing as foolproof as fools are so ingenious. If you find any way you think it can be improved then let us know - we are always open to suggestions and our software developers love developing software.

The usual copyright stuff

This application is under the copyright of EnQuant but you are free to use and modify it as you choose (but not give it away or sell it). You are even permitted to modify the code and make use of any of the functions in other applications using the magic of copy and paste. You are, obviously, free to sell or give away your own applications as you choose, but you must retain our copyright statements at the header of each of our functions.