A time book is a mostly outdated accounting record, that registered the hours worked by employees in a certain organization in a certain period. These records usually contain names of employees, type of work, hours worked, and sometimes wages paid. In the 19th and early 20th century time books were separate held records. In those days time books were held by company clerks or foremen or specialized timekeepers. These time books were used by the bookkeeper to determine the wages to be paid. The data was used in financial accounting to determine the weekly, monthly and annual labour costs, and in cost accounting to determine the cost price. Late 19th century additional time cards came in use to register labour hours. Nowadays the time book can be a part of an integrated payroll system, or cost accounting system. Those systems can contain registers that describe the labour time spend to produce products, but those registers are not regularly called time books, but timesheets.
History Before the 19th century employees could be registered on a payroll, especially in cases such as crewmembers on a ship or soldiers stationed in a location. The paid wages were noted in daybooks, in which daily expenses were registered, and eventually in the other accounts in the bookkeeping systems.
Origins, early 19th century In the 19th century when organizations started to grow a separate register of labour hours emerged, which was called a time book. There were used to keep account of the work done. Loudon (1826) explained, that in gardening the books necessary for the system of keeping accounts are, the time-book, the cash-book, and the forest or plantation book. Loudon described how time books were handled in those days:
The master inserts the name of every hand; and the foreman of each department inserts the time in days, or proportions of a day, which each person under his care has been at work, and the particular work he or she has been engaged in. At the end of each week the master sums up the time from the preceding Saturday or Monday, to the Friday or Saturday inclusive; the sum due or to be advanced to each man is put in one column, and when the man receives it he writes the word received in the column before it, and signs his name as a receipt in the succeeding column.The time-book, therefore, will show what every man has been engaged in during every hour in the year for which he has been paid, and it will also contain receipts for every sum, however trifling, which has been paid by the gardener for garden-labour. And furthermore:
In short, it would be difficult to contrive a book more satisfactory for both master and servant than the time-book, as it prevents, as far as can well be done, the latter from deceiving either himself or his employer, and remains an authentic indisputable record of work done, and of vouchers for money paid during the whole period of the head gardener's services. In laying out grounds in a distant part of the country, where upwards of two hundred men were employed under one foreman, we have had their time, employment, and payments recorded, and receipts taken, in this way, and found it an effectual bar to every thing doubtful or disagreeable. In those days time books, as Loudon explained, were used on farms, but also in mines and in the emerging Iron and steel industry. Occasionally time books were also used to register the time, that a working steam engine had been in operation.
Accounting in industry, mid-19th century With the emerge of larger machine shops mid 19th century accounting methods developed in larger farm companies were applied in the growing industry. In his 1885 book on factory accounting Metcalfe gave a description of normal system of labour registration mid 1870s:
The timekeeper, generally the foreman, goes about the shop towards the close of the day and asks each workman how he has spent it; according to the workman's recollection he enters the time reported in a book, as hereafter described. Metcalfe noted that "an exception to this practice existed in [his] time at the National Armory, where, in some departments, each workman entered on a little slip of paper in his own language, the manner in which his time had been employed. This and the time were copied into the time book; but nothing more was done with the tickets. This practice was the germ of the system herein developed." Metcalfe (1885) continued to explain the general forms of time book (see images):
There are two general forms of time book; one, form A, in the nature of a pay-roll, in which the time made by each man during each day is entered in gross; and forms B and C, in which an attempt is made to show how the time so reported has been employed. Form B occupies a page for each day, and a line for each man. To save copying the names anew each day, it is customary to paste a fly slip on the back of the first page, which, being unfolded, serves for all successive pages and also gives more room for the daily record of employment. Form C, which is a combination in form as well as in name, was in use at the National Armory during my service there. Its great advantage over form B is the greater space it affords for inserting the names of employments upon which the workman has been engaged. It also permits the use of a smaller time unit, and consequently of a more exact definition of its record; for in form B the small space allotted for a description of the work, and the need of re-writing it every day tends naturally to the consolidation of entries; whereas in form C an entry once made stands good for the whole month, provided that the workman always calls the same work by the same name. Sequentially Metcalfe saw a series of objections against the existing time books registration (based on form B and C):
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