Business Success with a Windows Time Tracker – Here’s How an Hourly Time Tracker Can Help
Business Success with a Windows Time Tracker – Here’s How an Hourly Time Tracker Can Help
Challenges in Finding an Hourly Time Tracker for Windows
All businesses and organizations want to be successful, no matter if this is in monetary terms or in how many people they can service.
To be successful an essential part is knowing how to optimize your project management and how your workforce go about their daily lives. To be able to optimize, you need to know what to optimize for, and to know that, you need to know how your employees spend their time. So an essential ingredient here is to track your time, and keep track of how your activities and projects are progressing.
In the old days an hourly time tracker would come in the form of a system where employees would be punching in and out when they arrived and went home from your company. Those days are long gone and in most office environments you would be using a software solution, typically a Windows time tracker. That is, time tracking software based on Microsoft Windows.
In some organizations this would come in the form of a spreadsheet that staff would need to remember to fill out manually and also remember when they did which tasks.
This can be highly inaccurate, and if you are using this as the basis for payroll processing or for sending an invoice for your billable hours, this can be disastrous. It is also cumbersome for employees, take a lot of time to use and is often highly inaccurate.
So what to do?
How an Hourly Windows Time Tracker Can Help
When looking for a time tracker Windows is in most professional organizations the platform used. However, you need to look further than that. You need to think about the tools that your employees are using on a daily basis and are comfortable using, and find a timesheet solution that builds on this.
Besides Windows, most professional organizations and companies use the Microsoft Outlook calendar for scheduling their activities and appointments. You should therefor find timesheet software will seamlessly integrate with this and let you use these appointments as the basis for your time tracking. This will make life so much easier for your employees, and will also make your time tracking much more accurate, whether this is for a specific project or just time off.
If you have the need for it, you should also be able to do expense tracking as well as have hourly rates in the system.
Another of the features that your solution should have is the option of having supervisors approve the submitted work hours.
Some of your users may sometimes be working on the go, so you should be able to report your hours also when offline, and then have the system synchronize the next time you are online.
Getting Data Out of the System
When having collected all this timesheet data, you should also be able to get some data out of the system. The system should thus be able to provide you with strong reporting capabilities to give you an overview of how time has been spent and also being able to dive into this data as you see fit.
You should be able to save such reports to for example Excel, and you should furthermore be able to import and export data to and from the system via CSV files.
This should all be part of a solid Windows time tracker.
How to Make the Solution Benefit Everyone
A lot of users may have previously used an hourly time tracker based on a spreadsheet or a solution where they needed to type in their time manually, so they may be a bit reluctant when it comes to reporting time.
However, if you show them how an Outlook-based solution works, and how easy it will be for them, they are sure to support the implementation.
Involve your users early in the process and show them how this is not for breathing down their necks and control their every move, but a help for them to see how they spent their time and being able to optimize the way they work and also how the whole organization operates.
Give them access to the reporting functions, possibly only for their own time, so they can see exactly on which activities they spent the majority of their time and where they could spend more.
In this way your Windows time tracker will benefit the whole organization, from every employee all the way to top management, and also clients and partners.
Next Steps
You know that more traditional approaches to reporting time, where you enter time manually in a separate system is often very inaccurate and is also often met with a lot of user resistance. So you should find a solution that they will actually enjoy using and see immediate benefits from. Such a solution should be based on your Microsoft Outlook calendar appointments. It should also provide you with easy and strong overviews and insights into how time has been spent, for individual users and projects as well as the organization overall.
All this will make time reporting much more accurate and provide you with the insights and tools you need to make your company or organization a tremendous success.
How To Continue From Here - What You Should Do Now
