How to Find the Best Time Tracker

Whether you are a freelancer, a small company or a large organization, you want to accurately keep track of how you spent your time. However, finding a solution that is not a hassle to your employees, and is also accurate can be a challenge. This article will explore the pitfalls but also exactly how you can solve this and get a solution that is not only accurate but which your staff will love to use.

Read on…

Finding the Best Time Tracker – Challenges

When you are looking for the best time tracker, you may encounter different challenges. If you have tried to track time in the past you may have had to use a paper-based solution or possible a spreadsheet on your computer. You may also have had a software product for this, but one where you needed to start the program and then manually enter your time.

The challenge with all these ways of time tracking is that it is usually a big hassle for most users, and it is also very often very inaccurate, since your employees need to remember what they did and when they did it.

This can have a very negative effect on several areas of your company. First of all your overall project management will suffer because it is not clear how time is actually being spent. If you are doing billable hours, your invoicing will be inaccurate, which may cause either your clients or your own company not to be too happy. If your staff is paid by the hours, payroll may also be inaccurate, again causing either you or your staff to become not too happy.

So finding a solution that is not a hassle to your employees and at the same time is accurate can be a bit of a challenge.

Luckily there is a solution to all of this. Read on…

The Features of the Best Time Tracker

So you want a solution that helps you track your work hours in an easy way and that is at the same time precise. This is the case no matter of this is for project time or simply time off. So where should you look?

In most professional organizations and companies today, the Microsoft Outlook calendar is the standard for scheduling appointments, so the best time tracker you can find should be able to build on this and use the Outlook calendar appointments as the basis for your time reporting. A solution like this will fit perfectly into your organization’s workflow and be an intuitive extension of how people already work.

When your users create appointments in their Outlook calendar they can then also add an organization, project and activity. In this way time reporting cannot be much more easy for your users.

It should also come with strong reporting capabilities and data integration with other systems. The data from the system should easily be able to be exported to Excel or simply CSV files, so that you can work with data in other systems if you want to, and easily share data with other stakeholders.

Supervisors should also be able to optionally approve submitted hours. This is especially important if the time is the basis for billing and client activities. However, for internal projects, including administration and time of, this can also be highly beneficial.

If you have the need to, you can also send notifications to users who have missed reporting some of their hours.

Furthermore if you have the need for hourly rates, expense tracking and expense reports, the system should of course also be able accommodate this.

Getting User Support

The task of implementing a new system for reporting time, may seem daunting, but if you have found the best time tracker, it does not have to be so.

Make sure that you communicate the benefits of the system clearly to your employees and how the time tracking system will make life easier for them. Also show how they can generate reports of their own time, so that they can see how they spent their time on various activities and projects. This will benefit everyone.

Also, since the solution is based on a system they already know, the Microsoft Outlook Calendar, almost no training is needed and they can easily get started without having to enter different systems and remember what they did when. The information is already there, and they just need to add a bit more information to their appointments and their time tracking is done.

It cannot get much better than this.

So remember to involve your users from the beginning and clearly show them the benefits, and they are sure to support the implementation of the system.

Next Steps

The best time tracker will help you streamline and organize your operations and increase profitability. It is as simple as that, and it is easily achievable if you just follow the guidelines set forth in this article.

So bear the following in mind: