The Best Way to Track My Work Hours with an Hourly Timesheet in Outlook

If you’ve ever wondered ‘I want to track my work hours with an hourly timesheet, but am not quite sure how to go about it, this article is for you.

We will be exploring the pitfalls when finding a solution, what you should be aware of, how to find the best possible solution and also how you make implementation a breeze and how you gain employee support for the project at the same time.

Read on…

Challenges when Wanting to Track My Work Hours

You may have heard yourself saying ‘I want to track my work hours, but it seems like such a hassle.’ If you have ever said this, you are not alone. Finding good time tracking software so that you can track your time, and keep track of how time is spent can be a daunting task.

Some timesheet software products are actually more of a hindrance in the quest to see how you spent your work time and the activities that you and your team get paid to do.

Some products require you to use a form of spreadsheet and more often than not you need to start and manage multiple software programs to submit your timesheets. Thus you end up spending almost as much time manually submitting your timesheet as the actual time you spent on more productive activities. Also, here you need to remember what you did when and for whom, which then ends up being inaccurate.
This will have a direct negative impact on the clients that you spent your time for, and also for the time that you spend on internal projects for your company. This can then as a result have a negative impact on invoicing and possibly payroll processing and your paycheck.

So the question you may then be asking is: ‘Then how do I get a proper solution for my time, so that I can submit my hourly timesheet in an easy and accurate way?’

Luckily there is a solution…

An Hourly Timesheet Solution that Actually Works

The best way to solve the question, ‘how do I track my work hours in the best possible way?’, is to get a solution that supports the way you work and does not hinder it. You want an employee timesheet solution that suits your workforce and is easy to use.
So where to look?

Most professional companies and organizations use Microsoft Outlook, so having a time tracking solution that can easily integrate with this is paramount.

In this way you can easily report time based on your Microsoft Outlook calendar appointments, and use this as the basis for your hourly timesheet.

You will then get an intuitive solution that will make it easy and accurate to report time, whether it is billable hours or internal projects and activities such as administration or sick leave.

You should then also be able to easily generate reports based on your project time, and be able to export these to Excel or CSV format, no matter if this is used for billing and sending an invoice to your clients, or if it is used for payroll or simply project management.
You may also want supervisors to be able to approve time entries before they are further processed. This is especially nice if it is billable hours that you are then exporting for invoicing.

Also, the ability to have expense tracking and hourly rates in the system are also very nice features to have.

How to Make It Benefit Everyone

Implementing a time reporting solution may seem like an overwhelming task and you may be nervous about how your workforce will react to it. It actually does not have to be like this.
If you find a solution that easily fits with how they work today and is integrated with the Microsoft Outlook calendar, it will be a breeze for your users and employees to use.

There are also more things that you can do to ensure success with the implementation of the solution:
Make sure that your users are involved from the beginning and show them how it benefits all. You will not be using this to monitor their every move but to help them optimize the way they work, so that the right projects get the attention that they need and deserve.

This will also make your clients and partners happier, and will definitely increase profitability as you will be better able to manage projects and your clients will see how professionally you run your business and your projects.

Giving users access to the reporting function will also give them insights, and they may end up saying ‘I simply love to track my work hours.’

So all this is possible if you just find an hourly time tracker solution that is easy to use and still provides you with accurate results, which you can share internally and with your clients and partners.

Next Steps

After having read all of the above, imagine that your company or organization has the best possible timesheet reporting solution in place and that your users and employees really like to track their time and the task of submitting an hourly timesheet is not considered a hassle, but actually a benefit to everyone.

This is possible if you just find a solution which supports your business and works with it rather than against it, and also provides you with insights into how things are going, how projects are progressing and how everything is improving.

So overall, keep these points in mind when you want an answer to ‘the best way to track my work hours’:

It should support your business and not hinder it
It should be easy for users to work with
It should be integrated with the Outlook calendar
It should provide strong reporting capabilities
It should include options for tracking expenses and hourly rates if you need this
Show your users how they will benefit from it