What is Timekeeping?
What is Timekeeping?
‘What is timekeeping?’ You may have asked this question, since you have heard that to get ahead nowadays, you need to know how people spent their time, and you also need to know how you are spending your own time. Long gone are the days where you would be punching in and out with a timecard at the beginning and end of your workday.
If you are in an office environment there are much better ways of doing this. Let’s take a look at how you can answer the question ‘What is timekeeping?’
The Challenges with Timekeeping
Finding a solution that fits your organization’s needs is usually the biggest challenge when starting on the road on finding a good time tracking software solution.
You do not want your workforce being unhappy using your time reporting system. The challenge with some products is that they are a hassle to use.
Your employees need to get to know a new piece of software and they also need to go into different systems to report time. Ironically they spend a lot of time just reporting time. This can lead to inaccurate time tracking (if people use the system at all), which can then lead to issues with HR, including payroll processing, sick leave, time off (including paid time off). It can also lead to issues with project management overall and result in managers and users not knowing how they have spent their time on internal projects as well as client projects.
As a result of this, users may not be compensated right and get the right figures on their paycheck, and you also do not know if the number of hours spent on a project has been in excess of what was agreed.
So overall when you want to get the answer to ‘What is timekeeping?’, you do not want a solution that makes things harder on your employees and makes things inaccurate. You want the opposite of that.
What is Timekeeping – The Solution
Based on the above challenges, you want a solution for your company that makes it as easy as possible for your users to report time and at the same time makes it accurate, so that you can actually see how you spent your work hours and work time and in this way determining the best way forward and the best use of resources.
The major thing here is to find a solution where a minimum of training is needed, so you should look at products that your employees are already comfortable using.
Most organizations today use the Microsoft Outlook calendar for scheduling and managing their appointments. You should therefore find a solution that can integrate with this calendar and use the appointments as the basis for your time tracking.
In this way it is easy for users and managers to keep track of how time is spent, where to optimize and how to divide resources in the best possible ways.
The solution should then come with standard reports, which would also include a graphical representation of data and you should be able to export this to CSV files or just Excel, so that you can work with this data in other systems, if you need to do so.
An optional approval of time entries by supervisors is also great to have, and this is especially the case if you are working with an hourly rate on client projects. They want your time reporting to be accurate and so do you, so that you are compensated fairly for the hours worked.
Making the Benefits Clear
So now you have found the ideal timekeeping system that integrates with the Microsoft Outlook calendar and gives you clear overviews of how time has been spent. But how do you get your employees to support the implementation and this way of doing things?
First of all, it is extremely important to answer their concerns about what is timekeeping in our organization used for. Underline that it is not to watch their every move and make sure that they meet in on time. It is so that they and the management can see how time is being spent and on which projects. You also want to be able to see how these projects are moving forward.
These insights can really be an eye opener to most people, since you may sometimes have some guesses about how time is being spent, but seeing the facts can sometimes be somewhat surprising.
So make sure that everybody involved know that this is used to make life easier for everybody and making the organization more effective and making the individual user more effective by spending time on the right things.
Next Steps
So when answering the question ‘What is timekeeping?’, you should now be able to answer that it is a good software solution that takes the following into consideration:
- Find a solution that supports your way of working
- Have integration with the Microsoft Outlook Calendar
- Have strong reporting capabilities
- Be beneficial to both employees and management
- Involve users early and show them the benefits
How To Continue From Here - What You Should Do Now
