Top 6 Uses of Time Tracking with Your Outlook
Top 6 Uses of Time Tracking with Your Outlook
Time tracking and monitoring is critical for any business because it can make the difference between being a thriving one and an unprofitable one. Not managing and tracking time when running a company can be likened to building a house without a plan. There is no focus and anything goes, so there will be a lot of waste and loss. Nothing will be accomplished.
The Microsoft Outlook Calendar is one of the best time management programs available today. But in order to be effective for corporate use, supplemental software needs to be integrated with it to enhance its capabilities, as well as support time tracking.
Here are some of the top uses of time tracking with your Outlook Calendar:
1. Employee time monitoring
Time tracking via Outlook with a supplemental software is a great way to monitor employee time. Employee productivity is one of the most important aspects of a thriving company, and tracking the actual time spent by your staff on their specific job descriptions against the time they should be spending on them can help a lot in measuring manpower efficiency. It is also a non-threatening way of tracking their time because they are already used to using the program for their own personal scheduling needs.
Using a solution like TimeSheet Reporter together with the Outlook Calendar will allow your company to accomplish this task without much trouble. Furthermore, since the time tracking system is based on a conventional program, your employees will not have a hard time updating their timesheets every so often. They will not have a problem complying and submitting their time monitoring reports on time as well because the software is already familiar. With Outlook’s user-friendliness and practicality, tracking employee time should not be a source of internal conflicts.
2. Vacation time monitoring
This Outlook-based time tracking tool is also ideal to use in monitoring employee vacation time. This is especially helpful, since vacation monitoring can be highly complicated and stressful.
It is not enough to use a plain spreadsheet file to input and update vacation time of a lot of people. Doing so makes the job extremely error-prone, which could result in wrong compensation for one, two, or several of your employees. Meanwhile, a highly complicated software will just discourage your employees from setting their vacation schedules. Time tracking with the Outlook Calendar using TSR has the perfect combination of simplicity and proficiency that is appropriate for the task.
The enhanced Outlook time tracker can save your company a lot of money as well by allowing you to monitor your employees’ vacation from a single point which can be operated by just one person. You don’t need to have a whole department or team handling the entire job of vacation tracking if one could do it effectively. Other members of the team can spend their time on things that matter more or that needs their specific skill sets.
3. Schedule management
The Microsoft Outlook Calendar is good to use for setting up meetings with co-workers, appointments with clients, and other tasks in general. The software is versatile enough so that employees can also utilize it to manage both their own personal and work schedules if they want to. There is no need to have different programs to handle similar functions, which can further help with employee efficiency.
Doing your time tracking via Outlook builds on that and makes it easy for everybody to schedule their time and at the same time report it. With the reporting function in TSR you can actually also see what employees have planned in the future, which will also be beneficial.
4. Customer invoicing
Time tracking with the Outlook Calendar can help a lot in producing accurate customer billings and invoices. This is particularly important because customer payments are really the lifeblood of any business venture. It is the way a company generates income, so making it as accurate and correct as possible should be a top priority.
Since TimeSheet Reporter makes it possible to report time via Outlook also when offline, and also via their smartphones, employees can easily update their timesheets also when in the field.
For instance, if one of your employees has just finished providing a service onsite to a client, he or she can immediately input his time data and the company can also right away generate an accurate invoice for the customer. Doing this consistently will greatly increase operational excellence, which will not go unnoticed by your patrons.
With excellent customer service, you will gain the additional benefit of having your company brand boosted as well. Customers are kept happy and satisfied with the way you deal with them so you can benefit more from word-of-mouth marketing.
5. Workflow streamlining
Speaking of service excellence, an effective time management system, such as time tracking via Outlook, can also be used to streamline operational workflows or business processes. When you are able to monitor the time spent on different specific tasks in a particular workflow, you can find out which ones are outdated, obsolete, or are just simply not necessary or not effective. By identifying these types of processes, team leaders can make adjustments or remove them entirely when really needed.
Workflow streamlining results in operational excellence, which, as mentioned in the previous item, is important in building a reputable brand. When your company’s brand and reputation is solid, people will start to trust in it and it will translate into a bigger customer base, which in turn will lead to bigger profits as well.
6. Project management
Lastly, time tracking with your Outlook Calendar can also be used when managing special business projects such as building a structure, implementing a new software, or organizing a big corporate project. Time is of the essence when companies have these kinds of special projects to complete, and an efficient time monitoring system is essential.
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