Always give 100% at work

I always give 100% at work; 10% on Monday, another 20% on Tuesday, 40% on Wednesday, almost done with another 10% on Thursday, and the remaining 20% on Friday to make my 100%! While this may be an old joke, cost allocation plans (CAP) and user fee studies also require accounting for 100% of all employees’ available work hours.

First off, the available work hour for a year is not 2,080 hours. We must remove the hours not available for work, such as holidays, vacations, average sick leave, and legal work breaks. This leaves most employee with an average 1,600 available work hours.

More importantly, the 100% of an employee must be properly accounted for, or the CAP/User Fee Study would risk a legal challenge. For instance, you cannot estimate how many hours a Project Planner spends on a Conditional Use Permit (CUP), without talking about how many CUP’s are performed within a year, what other fee based services are performed, and what other tax based services are provided.

With the table below, looking at just the hours spent for each service is not enough, and the total amount of time and percentages for fee services should not exceed 100%. This table also allow us to validate the 20% of planning counter time provided to the general public. Does eight hours per week, or roughly two hours per day at the planning counter seem realistic?

Project Planner Hours Each # per Year Total Hours % of Time

Fee-Conditional Use Permits 10 20 200 12.5%

Fee-Plan Reviews 8 100 800 50.0%

Fee-Planning Service 03 6 16 96 6.0%

Fee-Planning Service 04 4 16 64 4.0%

Fee-Planning Service 05 2 4 8 0.5%

Tax-Planning Counter 320 20.0%

Tax-Economic Development 112 7.0%

Total 1,600 100.0%

We also perform a 100% test for the Cost Allocation Plan, which focuses on services provided citywide. Typically, a Finance Manager would split their available work hour among direct fee service (reconciling a bounced check), direct tax service (grant administration) and indirect services (budgeting). We need to verify that the percentages in the three areas are reasonable, and equal 100%.

Overall, it takes more efforts to properly account for all employee’s times, and doing so will give you more confidence in the CAP/user fee study. If the calculation for all the parts do not make up 100%, then you might have a problem.