Enterprise Time Tracking Software – The EASY Way
Most employers worry that their employees may sometimes be wasting and misusing their time and resources. Either they are on client meetings, sales visits, site visits, working on computers, working remotely, or working from home as the new normal. While the employees are found complaining about their missing working hours, many internal and external projects are also affected by mismanaged time.
Enterprises are always searching for a way to optimize their employees’ working hours. They look for professional solutions like enterprise time tracking software which are instrumental in facilitating employers to document and trace time entries from their employees. Organizations which experience one or more of the following workplace situations can extract numerous benefits from this affordable tool:
- Having flexi work hours;
- Having multiple offices or site offices;
- Having work-from-home arrangement;
- Having a project-based payment and remuneration system;
- Having multiple human resources working on multiple tasks.
Enterprise time tracking software integrated with MS Outlook facilitates enterprises in recording and analyzing timesheets from their employees. Moreover, such an instrument can likewise be utilized viably to handle contractual workers, multiple client accounts and administrative tasks.
Why Do You Need Enterprise Time Tracking Software?
Some organizations look at enterprise time tracking software as an additional administrative responsibility. A lack of interest or commitment from the team and a misunderstanding on the part of the management that using such a tool would dampen creativity at the workplace will wrongly push them not to opt for this highly useful function, but the reality is quite the opposite. A myriad of benefits comes with using time tracking software for your enterprise. And if used correctly, it can help employees and business managers to think on a macro level and open new avenues of creative thinking.
Using any kind of time reporting software is usually more beneficial than using none. But the right and wise selection of the utility is pivotal, as complicated systems might lead employees to neglect its usage, or even refrain from using it—which is almost as equal as not using any enterprise time tracking software at all.
General Features to Look For
An enterprise time tracking system offers flexible options that easily fit the various needs and requirements of your business. Whether it is about simplifying the process of time reporting for the staff members or avoiding over/under scheduling or optimally allocating project resources, enterprise time tracking software can easily integrate with your organizaion and give you the results you need.
Time Tracking: Helps you track the worked hours with accuracy up to minutes in a log sheet.
Project Management: Helps you to set deadlines on projects and prioritize tasks.
Automatic Alerts: Helps you in setting up notifications and reminders, for example for missed time entries. Notifications are usually semi-automated.
But the question which puzzles most business owners is, “Why should we use enterprise time tracking software”? Well, here are some of the inevitable reasons.
Financial Benefits
Rate Revision
Many businesses remain unaware of the fact that they need a rate revision. The best indication for rate revision is the data that is gathered from your time tracking software. A glimpse of the time spent on each task and the employee pay-out and overall profit on a task can give an indication whether the pricing model is appropriate or needs a revision.
Better Estimations and Quotations
Generating accurate quotes and near-to-accurate estimates will get you in a trusted position with your clients. By keeping an accurate record of each type of task completed, you can adjust and improve your quotations accordingly. A single-click report can be instantly generated to review the type of task and the time it takes, which can be applied immediately on your upcoming quotation.
Transparency in Billing Clients
Every member of the team can give a rough approximation of how long they might need to complete a certain task, but rough estimates are usually not the same as accurate logs. For example, if you complete 10 jobs a week, and each job takes 15 minutes more than estimated, you are missing out on 130 billable hours every year. It is your hard-earned money and you deserve every penny of the time you put in.
Tracking Contractual and Freelance Employees
Companies who hire freelancers or other contractual employees need to share the same log with them which they share with their permanent staff. This can help them to ensure only the billable hours are paid off, and also enable them to track the performance of different contractual employees to the best-matched person, for better allocation of work.
Overall Profitability
Once you visualize the exact picture of which hours are consumed on which jobs, you can analyze whether you are gaining profits or not. Are you exhausting too many efforts into tasks that are not paying off likewise? These insights can be gauged by analyzing the data generated from enterprise time tracking software.
Operational Benefits
- Maintaining the queue: Do employees often find themselves in situations where they are uncertain about their next steps? Or are they found taking things for granted when there are certain deadlines to be met. Enterprise time tracking software enables them to take ownership of their work and makes them realize the responsibility associated with certain upcoming activities and their deadlines. You can engage your team in a self-challenging position where they can measure if they can beat their own time to complete a certain task while doing it again on another job.
- You can identify areas of improvement: While reviewing productivity audits, companies can look out for tasks or jobs that are taking more time to accomplish. If every member of the team struggles with longer hours for that particular task, than companies might be able to highlight a process that needs to be revised, improved or adjusted.
- Accurate reporting for legal compliance: Many industries are required by the authorities to report the working hours of their teams for taxation and legal compliance purposes. This can be a cumbersome experience if these hours are compiled and reported manually. If you use good enterprise time tracking software, you can generate a report in only a matter of seconds.
- Setting your priorities right: With an efficient and reliable time tracking system, you can easily shift hours, reduce deadlines, and move designated persons for high priority projects. Your team is also able to view the hours for every milestone of the project undertaken as well as its exact completion phase. This helps bring transparency, responsibility, and accountability in a very clean way.
- Time tracking across locations and devices: With your team and employees spread across different locations, cities, and even countries, the right software for enterprise time reporting can help you maintain a consistent status of the various projects and tasks. Every employee has ready access to instantly update time entries, helping you and them both to update the exact status and working hours.
- Better Time/Project Analysis: If you want to have a comparative analysis of past and present organizational performance, and if you have improved over the past years for a certain type of task, you can easily compare the results obtained from different types of projects.
- Better to know if any team member is overextending himself/herself: Sometimes, people voluntarily take over a horde of activities and when those activities are piled up, they suddenly realize that they have overburdened themselves. Some do it on a regular basis out of habit, while others face it in times of heavy workload. Such situations can arise during busy intervals or seasonal variations in workloads.
- Value addition to your business: If you ever plan to sell your business venture, informing the potential buyer about the integration of enterprise time tracking software can be extremely beneficial as it shows that you run a professional operation with a reputation for accuracy, and they can see at a glance exactly what kind of output they can expect from the business.
Employee Benefits
- Timely Performance Reviews: When annual performance reviews approach at year end, it is beneficial to have a one-on-one session with every employee of the company and to encourage a healthy competition among them. This can be useful for business as well as the employees’ personal and professional growth, as it can help identify the strengths and weaknesses of the human resource.
- Better scheduling of projects: Projects which are planned or executed on the spur of the moment can have a negative impact on the client-agency relationship. Before demanding that your team work at a faster pace, you need to review your timeframes, deadlines, and schedules. If you see a consistent pattern in your projects, you need to schedule a more realistic timeframe.
- Rewards and recognition: Many employees, especially those who are not used to working with enterprise time tracking tools think that logging and tracking their timesheets may make them look as if they are slacking off. The reality is 180 degrees opposite, as the employers or managers can get a better view of who is working on what and reward them accordingly. If any employee is continuously over-achieving their target, it is time to consider their promotion. Also, staff can be compensated on the basis of time-based challenges or competitions.
Bottom Line
Wherever and whenever specific targets and goals are set and allocated to individual employees or teams, enterprise time tracking software can play a significant role in motivating, educating, and coaching employees to attain improved results for both themselves as well as the organization as a whole. This can help in careful and sure-shot planning of deliverables, milestones, and long-term goals. We always hear that “Time Is Money” but enterprise time tracking software is the true meaning of this saying. So let us embrace the power of technology and implement a strong and dependable time trackingsystem to reduce expenses, eliminate business leakages, and maintain better records.
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