5 Benefits of TimeSheets for Salaried Employees via Outlook

Knowing how you spent your time is paramount these days. If you compare it with the opposite – NOT knowing how you spent your time – this will seem even more obvious.

However, some companies and organizations believe that unless they pay their employees by the hour, there’s no need to track time, and no need to have timesheets for salaried employees.

The thing is, though, that no matter if you pay your staff by the hour or if they have a fixed salary, tracking your organization’s hours is paramount to it’s survival as well as thriving.

Finding a solution that is easy and benefits everybody

The above being said, if you’ve ever used a more traditional approach to tracking time, where you or your teams would need to type in your hours manually, you might not be a huge fan. This approach very often ends up taking a lot of time and also becomes quite inaccurate.

Fortunately there is a solution to this. What you simply need to do is to find a software solution that builds on a tool that your employees already know and are familiar with. If you’re for example using Microsoft Outlook in your company, it would be natural to find a time tracking solution that builds on this, for example like TimeSheet Reporter. This will allow your employees to easily track time based on their Outlook calendar appointments, and thus timesheets for salaried employees will be really easily accomplished while also giving your company a load of benefits:

1 Increased productivity

Tracking your time means that you will know exactly how and where you spent your time. When you create your appointments in Outlook, you can also, with the right solution, turn these into time entries and select which organization, project and activity they are related to.

When you then generate reports, you can easily see where time has been spent, both by employee as well as for the organization overall. You can also see which projects and activities take up the most time, and then decide if you’re using your resources in the best way possible.

Are there areas where you spent too much time and areas where you spent to little, are some tasks taking too long to accomplish and do you need to move resources around a bit. All this will be visible with the right reporting tool, and make productivity soar.

2 Support for flexitime via timesheets for salaried employees

When your employees are on a fixed salary, you will usually also have an agreement on the expected number of hours that they put into their work. Sometimes this is defined on a daily basis, say for example 8 hours per day. Sometimes this is defined on a weekly basis, for example 40 hours, sometimes monthly, etc.

However, no matter how you define the expected number of hours, it’s nice for both management and also the individual employee to know whether they work more or less than this.

For management it’s good to know since they can then see if they get what they pay for. If some employees also for example always put in more hours than expected this can be a sign that more resources need to be added to the team.

For employees they can also see if they are putting in more hours or less hours than required. This can be useful information when having performance reviews, etc.

If your time tracking solution also offers a simple flexitime feature this is a huge benefit. Then you can see if you’ve worked more or less than you should and carry that over. So if you for example have worked five hours more than expected one week, this may mean that you can then take some hours off the next week.

The right solution for timesheets for salaried employees will easily provide you with such an overview.

3 More accurate billing of clients

If you’re working on client projects, tracking your hours accurately also means that you will be able to bill your clients more accurately. Just missing invoicing for a single billable hour may not seem to be such a big deal, but when you add it up for several employees and for several weeks, the amount of money may actually be quite substantial.

Even if you’re doing fixed-fee projects for clients, you still need to know how many hours you spend on it, to know if it makes financial sense or not.

4 Better management overview

In addition to all the above, if you have a tool with strong reporting capabilities, management will also easily be able to draw reports and see how time has been spent. They will be able to see how many hours they spent on individual projects, clients, etc. and also see how their employees are doing.

As mentioned earlier, they can also see if their salaried employees are working more or less than expected, and can then for example go their board to require more resources if needed, or move around on resources as required.

Management will also be able to quickly create reports that can be saved to Excel, to send out an overview to clients, management or project managers, so that everybody knows the status of things and how time is being spent, and if it’s being spent in the right way.

5 Happier employees

Another huge benefit of the right time tracking solution, and one of the benefits with timesheets for salaried employees, is that it will help increase employee satisfaction.

With the right solution, you can give employees access to create reports. You can then decide if they should only be able to see their own hours or if they should be able to see everything. In all cases they will easily be able to see how they spend their time, and also adjust accordingly to help increase their own productivity. This will be a huge morale booster since they will feel that they are also in charge of their own jobs.

They can also use this information when having performance reviews with their managers. Then they can look at the numbers objectively together and have see how things are going.

So, as you can see from the above, getting a good, solid time tracking solution will benefit everybody. Just make sure that it builds on something that your employees know, for example Outlook, so that it’s easy for them to use, and management will get the numbers they need, ensuring that everybody is happy.