Microsoft Office Time Tracking – The Benefits

Time tracking is supposed to be a thing, right? You track your time with the calendar that comes with Microsoft Office together with TimeSheet Reporter, and there’s some magic that happens and somehow better decisions get made so everyone can make more money.

Or something.

As you might imagine, there’s just a bit more to it than that.

Why track time?

The point of doing Microsoft Office time tracking in the Outlook Calendar together with a solution like TSR isn’t to determine who is or isn’t doing the job they should be—though you can do that if you want—it’s to determine what projects are costing you in terms of time. Time, as they say, is money, especially when you’re paying for it. Basically you cannot make good business decisions about which projects to pursue when, without knowing how much they are going to cost—in money and time. If you don’t track your time, how are you going to know?

What do we track?

What then are we tracking?

In short, everything.

There’s no need to monitor bathroom and lunch breaks down to the minute, but if someone has to research something for a certain project, you want to know how much that time costs. If someone is doing any kind of work on a project, you want to make sure how much time is spent on this,

Whenever your employees are spending time on a project, you need to be able to capture that information and aggregate it across your enterprise so you can make good decisions.

The easiest way to get this data, of course, is to have each employee track it themselves in Microsoft Office’s Outlook Calendar, which is possible with a solution like TimeSheet Reporter.

What’s the benefit of Microsoft Office time tracking?

The benefit of tracking time in Microsoft Office’s Outlook Calendar is better, faster business decisions. Remember, your time costs your organization the same way your employees’ does, and you don’t want to be wasting your time collecting data. You want to spend your time wisely analyzing data so you can optimize operations and make your department – and the whole company – as profitable as it can be.

How do we use it to make good decisions?

The key to the whole thing is integration. That’s why we’ve mentioned Microsoft Office and the Outlook Calendar. They are the industry standard and what most companies today use. Together with a proper add-on like TSR, you can actually use your calendar appointments for time tracking.

That’s because there isn’t a calendar application on the market that is robust enough to do all the aggregation across dozens—or hundreds—of individual employee calendars to tease out the data you really want. That’s why you’ll need a time tracking add-on for Outlook.

But it’s what you do with the data that is key. You’ll want to find an application that can break things down by project and by type of work done. That’s how you’re going to be able to put a price tag on the time that goes into each project, and it’s only when that’s done that you can make solid business decisions.