How Time Tracking with Outlook Can Improve Business Operations

Operational excellence is what maintains a company to be consistently profitable and sustainable. In other words, it is what keeps the business alive and thriving. High standards of business operations can benefit not only the company itself but its employees and clients as well.

Streamlined day-to-day operations make every part of the company’s production or service simple and more efficient. The more effective a business can serve and do its purpose, the bigger its competitive edge over its rivals is. It becomes the product or service of choice by clients, which is a huge advantage in terms of the financial bottomline.

Not only that, efficiency saves the business a lot of money. By cutting down on time-wasting and creating savings, a company can increase profits, which benefits both the owners and the employees, and also makes it possible to create even better products.

Regarding company employees, the more simplified the business processes are, the greater will be their productivity. When employees are knowledgeable, well-trained, and not confused and overwhelmed with their tasks, they can fix potential operational problems right at its root without having to bother their department managers. This way, managers can focus on crafting ways to improve business operations even more, instead of troubleshooting mundane daily issues.

Operational excellence will also not go unnoticed by the actual customers of the company’s products and services themselves. Modern customers have really grown wiser. They can easily discern if a company is delivering its promise or not. With an outstanding setup, a business can give its customers a world class and satisfying experience every time they interact. This will turn regular patrons into loyal clients, which will attract more new customers. Having your regular clients act as your own devoted brand promoters and defenders is a sign of a sustainable and highly successful business.

These all-encompassing benefits of having efficient business processes should make operational excellence the number one priority of any company.

One of the best ways to improve business operations is time management. If you study the best practices of the top corporations in the world, you could see one thing in common in all of them: they effectively use their employees’ time.

The initial response of corporate management teams when faced with the responsibility of making sure that time wasters are at its minimum is to establish a well-developed time reporting system.

However, the problem with most time tracking systems is that they are too complicated and too different from the products they know, so that the employees are having a hard time using them. Most would need to be trained just to understand how to use a program that would supposedly make them spend their time better. Some of these programs can actually make an ordinary office employee use up half of his working day just to be able to create a decent report.

Because of these reasons, employees often simply put off and do not comply with these time tracking reports, especially when they find out that their supervisors and managers are also not abiding due to the complexity of the system.

What if you could have a time tracking system that uses a familiar time management tool like Microsoft Outlook and integrate it with supplemental software that makes time reporting more understandable and more suitable to employees’ needs? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Time tracking via Outlook

The Microsoft Outlook Calendar is one of the most commonly used programs today when it comes to personal time management. It is a simple tool and a highly utilized program by office employees to arrange and organize their work agenda.

With the simplicity of time tracking using Outlook, using a supplemental program, such as TimeSheet Reporter, that would allow employees to customize the system based on their individual preferences, they will no longer be scared or irritated when it comes to making time efficiency reports. Everything will be as easy as what they have already been used to doing. Compliance would be a lot more painless.

Another advantage of time tracking with Outlook with supplemental software is that all reports will become standardized. Even when each employee can customize the way they use the system, the parameters to be filled up will still be the same because everything is based on a single platform. With all reports uniform and harmonized, managers (who are the receivers of the reports) can easily notice schedule discrepancies or things to revise and improve on within only minutes. Reading reports will not be so much of a headache to do.

Other features that would make time tracking more manageable for office employees are:

Automatic report creation. As aforementioned, for standardization and consistency, the solution should allow users to automatically convert all their Outlook appointments into concise time reports. With a simple click of “ “Submit,” an employee should be able to send a comprehensive time tracking report to his or her supervisor. Again, with report creation this easy, a company can achieve almost 100 percent compliance without much effort.
Availability of the time tracking solution when you’re offline or in the field. Employees who are often doing field work should also be able to report hours. This should be possible either via their Outlook calendar or via their smartphones or tablets. This can be very convenient as you can update your schedule or submit a report wherever you are. You don’t have to wait until you get to the office to complete it.
Time tracking using Outlook when you are offline should also be possible. In cases where there would not be any wifi hotspot or internet connection, an offline version should also be available, when using Outlook. Once the user comes back to the office, the program will automatically synchronize and everything is updated.
Integrating the time reporting software to other essential company systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) should also be possible. By connecting time tracking with Outlook to critical processes of the business, processes will be faster and reports a lot more meaningful.

While this kind of time tracking tool seems ideal and out of reach, getting time tracking via Outlook is actually possible. The result is a system that is very useful for improving employee efficiency and business operations.

And you have probably guessed it by now… All this is possible with TimeSheet Reporter.

We’re looking very much forward to hearing from you.