My client has three reports that need to be filled out weekly for travel and for documenting the work he does as a contractor living in one state and working in another.

1. Invoice — Fill in travel hours, work hours, and expense amount from other reports to give a total amount owed to the contractor.
2. Itemed Expense Report — lists out all of the expenses for the week with Date, description, amount and any kind of notes that would be attached to the expense. This report typical includes airfare, hotel, meals, laundry expense (if needed), and car service from his home to the airport and back to his home in lew of parking expenses.
3. Departmental Report — This is a two page document supplied by the company he works for that is filled out weekly to explain how the contractor is spending his time while on the clock. This includes any meetings he attended, any training sessions he did for fellow employees, and documenting what projects he worked on while on location.

The final step in the process is to send these via his email to his contact at the company. I also CC him and myself so that we both know when the email went out.

I organize all three of these weekly in a folder system that looks like this:

REPORTS>YEAR>MONTH>FRIDAY DATE

Total time to complete: 15-30 minutes per week.

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** If I were to streamline this process, I would save the reports to a dropbox style folder where the contact could look at the files without having to send multiple copies. I would create a google sheet or excel that would house each expense report on a different tab and would save a universal copy of his documentation report that could be accessed online. The only item that I would send individual copies of would be the invoice so that a PDF copy could be shared with accounting on the other end.

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