Hi There,

I'm working on a small project for somebody at the moment. It involves the person inputting the work times of employees that work on a building site. This is all to do with costing the project for billing the customer etc.

Sometimes the manager will input the times worked by each employee and the task they were doing (paint,labor, plaster etc) on a daily basis.

e.g.1
Monday, John Doe, 7am - 4:30pm, Plastering
Monday, Jane Doe, 7am - 4:30pm, Painting
Tuesday, John Doe, 7am - 4:30pm, Plasternig
Tuesday, Jane Doe, 7am - 4:30pm, Painting
[continues like this for the entire week, for each employee]

Then other times they will just go along at the end of the week and tell me to split the workload by percentages for the whole week, with no consideration for employee times and tasks.

e.g.2
Painting, 50%
Plastering, 40%
General Labor, 10%
[that is how the week is broken down for cost, employees times are not recorded this way]

I'd like to know your opinions on this as my "client" will tell me that it must be this way. I can see so many things wrong with example 2.
It's just laziness on the managers part. There is no transparency here i.e. no record of employee hours etc and the percentages will be meaningless two, three or even 8 months down the road. Also, for me it will make the database cumbersome and harder to design..

I had planned on having one entity, TIMESHEET, to track employees time worked etc. Now if I have to design the database to cater for example 2 above I will need to create a second table for this method because they are really two seperate entities.

I'm also puzzled as to how I will be able to display the two entites in a uniform manner in my program when it comes to billing etc..

Just curious what you guys think as I'm inclined to reject the idea of working with the two methods above.

I'd really appreciate some fedback on this as i'm a little out of my depth on this...

Thanks..