Want the BEST Time Sheet Software? Get a Timesheet Plugin for Outlook
If you have finally decided to invest in timesheet software, you have made the best possible decision for your operational productivity. Maintaining a thorough record of where each employee’s time is invested is a key step towards improving the overall value of your work, getting more done in a limited time, and making your organization the success it deserves to be.
The Need for Time Sheet Software
There is a reason why all competitive businesses have flocked towards this state-of-the-art time management tool to boost their business. While the overarching reason is an upgrade in organizational success, timesheet software accomplishes that in numerous ways.
Raises the Efficiency of the Workspace
Timesheet software offers you real-time insights into the productivity of your workspace, telling you who is working on which project for how much time. This helps you answer a lot of questions such as:
- What is the cost-effectiveness of your strategy by comparing time input to profit output
- Strengths and weaknesses of each employee
- How are projects moving along
- Which employees or departments can take on more work and who is being overworked
All this information equips you with data that improves the decision-making in your firm, in terms of staff assignment, as well as the kind of projects to take on and deadlines to craft. When people are reallocated according to their skillset, operational efficiency is bound to rise.
Makes Employees Happier and More Productive
Timesheet software empowers employees by granting them increased ownership over their time. Like you have all the data available, they also have the same information at their disposal, allowing them to identify where they lag, if they are overburdened, how much absence and vacation time they have had, and what their schedule for the coming weeks looks like. Transparency is a key feature of timesheet software and that translates into higher employee satisfaction.
Moreover, when employees know their time is being tracked and that accurate information is what will eventually back up their prospects in the company such as promotions or more high-profile clients, it acts as a motivator to suppress procrastination. This improved discipline towards finishing tasks, once again, raises organizational productivity.
Optimizes Workflow
When you have crucial information such as which tasks take longer than necessary, it becomes simple to identify where the problem lies. If a particular department is constantly struggling with the same task, it might be wise to reallocate that task or hire external help, i.e. outsource, to mitigate the problem.
Maintenance of a thorough record of workloads, costs, billable time, employee absences, employee performances, resource availability, and many other variables provides you with an omniscient view into your workflow. This means that you have all the possible data to run analytics and trends on, enhancing the accuracy of your projections.
As a result, timesheet software refines your capacity planning in terms of future deadlines, recruitment needs, budgets, and resource requirements. You have all the data to back that up and not only does that save time and money, it improves your company’s standing in the market or industry.
It is timesheet software that presents you better before clients and gives your organization a competitive edge in the market.
Why is a Timesheet Plugin for Outlook the best option?
Outlook is a much more powerful tool than you might think. It is not just a simple platform to send emails and add appointments to a calendar but can very well serve as a time tracking solution, with the help of a simple timesheet plugin. It does not alter the way Outlook works, but simply adds on top of the existing infrastructure.
You already make appointments in the Outlook calendar. With a good timesheet plugin, all you need it to do is fill in a couple of extra fields such as the client, organization, project, and the activity and that has now been transformed into a time entry, allowing you to maintain a comprehensive record of time with minimal effort and no redundancy.
Among the myriad of options out there, a timesheet plugin for Outlook is simply the best for a lot of reasons.
Minimal Friction towards Change
When everyone is already focused on maximizing their productivity and meeting deadlines, adopting anything new into your fixed routine is a challenge, especially when it requires your time and effort to learn. That friction is taken care of, with a timesheet plugin for Outlook. Why is that?
Nowadays, there is hardly any business that does not use Outlook for various administrative tasks. Whether it’s communication via emails, managing appointments in its calendar function, or storing information on the cloud, everyone is acquainted with this routine application. When employees see that they don’t have to learn anything from scratch but rather minimally modify the way they use something they already know, they are much more likely to start using the timesheet software.
Easy to Use
When you are using timesheet software to manage time, you don’t want it to end up wasting a lot of it. This is where a timesheet plugin for Outlook shines because its user-friendly interface and extremely simple model make time logging quick, seamless, and a hassle-free experience.
When creating an Outlook appointment, you simply add a few extra fields, and that’s it. Time tracking is completed for that activity. It does not become much easier (and accurate) than this.
Cost-effective
Whenever you ask your employees to use something new, you need to spend some money to ensure their familiarity with that new software. Since everyone already knows how to operate Outlook, there is no cost of training, saving you a lot of money.
Using a timesheet plugin for Outlook also eliminates all administrative costs that would have otherwise been incurred if you were to use paper to manually record your time entries. Paper records are difficult to maintain, costly to manage, and ineffective in the long run as they are full of human errors – an issue absent in digital timesheet software.
Even if you use a spreadsheet for your time tracking, this takes a lot of time and resources to maintain.
Benefits of a Digital Ecosystem
While a third-party timesheet software might also get the job done to some degree, having your solution based on Outlook is a huge advantage. As mentioned above, your time entries are in sync with the Outlook calendar, eliminating all redundancies.
Similarly, your solution should be able to provide you with data in different formats. Both general reports as well as the raw data. This allows your timesheet to be easily exported into other software such as Excel, ERP, CRM, and accounting software, so that the same data can be used by various departments such as Accounting, Human Resources, and Management. This saves you the time of having to manually fill in records all over again, and also makes it really easy to share data and reports with various stakeholders.
Bottom Line
Proper timesheet software is an unparalleled project management tool and since it helps optimizing your organization, it is important to choose the best one out there. A timesheet plugin for Outlook has considerable advantages over any other timesheet software due to its simplicity, affordability, security, and flexibility, which is why you should not wait any longer to gain control of your business practices and optimize your business.
Use Outlook to its full potential – the way it was designed to be.
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