Top 9 Benefits of a Timesheet Tracker Integrated with Outlook
This might not come as a surprise, but a lot of organizations incur a loss each year owing to poor time management practices, outdated time-tracking approaches and time lost to non-work related activities at the workplace. Today, every business owner or manager is concerned with applying effective measures that improve business profitability as well as overall project management. Many businesses are adopting novel approaches that help decision-makers cut back on business maintenance costs, enhance profits and stay more productive and competitive.
Using and maintaining timesheets is one of the most cost-effective solutions for managing business activities and processes on a day-to-day basis. Understanding how we work is instrumental in mastering our productive performance. For decades, organizations have made it mandatory for every employee to fill out timesheets, which are then passed on to the Human Resource Departments for reviewing and processing for payroll and other purposes. Besides this, it has also been used for improving the overall management and improvement of the organization as a whole.
On the other hand, filling in timesheets by hand and keeping track of employee activities manually is an unnecessarily time-consuming process that poses a serious problem for most companies.
In such a scenario, the need for easy and at the same time accurate time-tracking systems becomes even more pressing as the business world evolves and becomes more and more digital in nature.
Benefits of Maintaining Daily Timesheets with a Timesheet Tracker
A business must account for the time employees and staff members spend on different work-related tasks and undertakings. In contrast to manual timesheets, a timesheet application is a computerized or digitized system of tracking the time employees have worked during a certain period, while also recording time spent on various types of activities, projects and clients.
A timesheet tracker integrated with Microsoft Outlook allows companies to better meet project deadlines, maintain costs and budgets and attain business success by utilizing time more efficiently. Here are some of the benefits of using a time tracker that can help to minimize waste and improve efficiency at the workplace.
1. A Timesheet Tracker Minimizes Time Wastage
The history of time tracking goes back to the earliest times, when it was used as the simplest method to measure work done and calculate payments due to workers. Using timesheets in today’s business environment helps managers and supervisors understand, track and determine where they might be wasting labor, time and other important resources, as well as where it’s spent the best, and can then optimize accordingly.
In fact, using a time reporting solution helps phase out activities or projects that might be taking longer than strictly necessary, or that might be draining more resources than they are giving results. A timesheet tracker integrated with Outlook assists managers in making solid decisions, quantify roadblocks, optimize time-sensitive tasks and projects and improve employee performance.
2. Timesheet Tracker Helps You Bill More Accurately
One of the foremost benefits of using a time tracking solution is that this tool enables you to bill your clients in real time. Timesheets play an indispensable role in letting your clients know that you are managing their projects as efficiently as possible, while ensuring that their money is not getting wasted in doing so. This guarantee is especially important when you are involved in a client-facing business that bills its clients on an hour-by-hour basis and also on fixed-fee projects.
Using a timesheet tracker integrated with Outlook enables you to justify your billed hours and invoices to your clients with the help of well-maintained records and concrete reporting procedures. Time tracking allows your clients to see how much time you are dedicating to the success of their projects, thereby leaving them little or no room to maneuver when it comes to settling your payments. So timesheets serve as solid evidence of your efforts and the accuracy of your billing procedures.
3. Improves Project Management
Time tracking is increasingly being employed both as a tool and as a source of essential data on how work is performed and what can be improved. By consolidating data entry, time entries and data processing, a time tracker integrated with Outlook helps automate basic processes involved in project management.
Time tracking offers a myriad of benefits to businesses in each stage of a project undertaking. Helping to keep track of the time being spent on specific projects and tracing project costs are obvious, but good time reporting software also offers surprisingly important benefits in the following ways:
- Provides an accurate assessment of project time usage and identifies areas where a team member takes more time than was originally allotted;
- Helps in determining the skills of an employee in a particular area – thus qualifying him or her for a new project or additional training based on performance.
- Helps in measuring the overall efficiency of a project and allowing project managers to monitor progress, remove delays and bottlenecks and see where improvements can be made.
4. A Timesheet Tracker Offers Improved Transparency
A timesheet tracker integrated with Microsoft Outlook offers many things to a business owner or manager, including enhanced traceability of data, improvement in cost estimation techniques, accurate billing and payroll data – all of which result in improved clarity and transparency in business processes.
In addition, timesheet data can be quickly collected, reviewed and summarized in reports, which can then be used as an evidence for justifying costs, expenses and client billing. Based on such accurate estimations, it becomes easier for managers and decision-makers to make more precise forecasts in the future. A good hours reporting solution is said to identify and prevent time leaks, workflow blockages and understaffing problems.
5. Simplifies Business Procedures
If you have a manual time tracking system at your workplace, you must be aware of how difficult it is to maintain an orderly, well-structured and easily-navigable paper records. In contrast, a digital timesheet solution offers a much simpler way to digitally collect, store, organize and retrieve data that can then be used for reporting and decision-making purposes.
By making tasks such as payroll, accounting and timesheet validations easier, a business manager can improve efficiency and ease the overall administrative load that tends to gobble up valuable time. In addition, by integrating the different systems and business processes at the workplace, a good solution offers ubiquitous computing and operational synergies that help spike productivity from both your administrative team as well as general staff.
6. Enables You To Become a Better Organizational Leader
A successful leader needs to connect with his or her team deeply and lead them with constant support and guidance. He or she must be able to know what his or her team is working on, how they are faring and if they are on the path to progress or decline.
Having accurate knowledge of what a team member is working on and how long she takes to do her job not only helps in better decision-making in the long run, but also enables you to be a more empathetic leader as you begin to understand the contributions and sacrifices of individual employees in helping you grow the business. Using a timesheet tracker, preferably one which integrates readily with Outlook, allows you to know where each member of the team stands.
While a timesheet tracker paints a full picture of everyone’s performance, it also allows you to understand your team more intimately. When you recognize and appreciate each team member’s contributions, you become a more empathetic leader and showing empathy inspires those who work with you.
7. Helps Present a Professional Face
If you are the kind of person who wants to get off on the right foot with clients, employees and even potential buyers all at the same time, using a timesheet tracker that is integrated with Outlook can prove to be an alluring proposition for your stakeholders.
Using state-of-the-art tools for accurately billing clients and using advanced time-management strategies considerably add to your corporate credibility and professionalism. For business owners who want to present a professional face to clients, a good time tracking solution is a unique selling proposition. On the other hand, if you plan to sell your business to potential buyers at some time in the distant or near future, you know that such efficient time-tracking systems can serve as a promising leverage.
8. Provides Improved Reporting and Scheduling
A time tracking system helps the human resource department to maintain daily timesheets, streamline payroll and better manage time-off, attendance, timesheet validations and approvals. Besides obvious administrative benefits, a good timesheet solution also improves reporting and scheduling tasks by enabling the business owners to manage timeframes, schedules and resource requirements according to teams’, projects’ and even departmental goals.
The right solution will come with strong reporting capabilities, which gives you an easy and fast overview of how time has been spent, and also the ability to share this information with other stakeholders.
9. Improves Compliance
This might come as a surprise to you, but using a proper time tracking system at the workplace can help maintain compliance with legal frameworks.
A business enterprise must conform to a web of many laws and regulations, and failure to do so may cause you a lot of trouble with the regulatory bodies. A timesheet tracker not only makes it easier for the human resource department to maintain detailed records of payroll processes, leaves and time worked, etc., it also allows you to easily follow regulation changes in labor laws and comply with the latest legal requirements.
The Bottom Line
A timesheet tracker offers a myriad of benefits to businesses today. With the integration of time tracking tools in Outlook, you no longer have to involve yourself in micromanaging your employees and risk stifling creativity at the workplace. In addition, a timesheet tracker can underpin a highly cohesive and well-organized record-keeping, reporting and scheduling system that improves productivity and performance by employees.
In a nutshell, time tracking helps you minimize time wastage and improve project management, client billing, transparency and simplicity in business processes, while at the same time maximizing your leadership potential and your company’s professional image in the marketplace.
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