Here’s How Time Tracking
Improves Productivity

You must know how much time your team spends on projects, not only for financial purposes, but to help improve their productivity and create more accurate invoices and payroll statements. Time tracking is easy with the right tools for the job, and with so many tools that track time available on the web, there’s sure to be one that can help your team improve their productivity. Here’s how time tracking helps you improve productivity.

Better Insight

Knowing what your employees spend their time doing and how long projects take is incredibly valuable insight that only time tracking can grant you. Keeping track of the hours and days one part of a project takes will let you know if there need to be efficiency improvements, or even if someone isn’t quite measuring up to your productivity standards.

An effective team is efficient and synchronized. You want the most productivity possible out of every hour, because the more work that gets done per hour, the more money you’ll make overall. Being aware of employee activity and better managing their time will ensure the highest productivity out of every minute of the workday.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a “helicopter” manager, where you’re constantly hovering over your team members to ensure they’re doing their required tasks. With management comes a certain level of trust for your team members, which is why having the right software is helpful. With time tracking apps, employees will be responsible for logging into or turning on the app, which will track their time for you. You’ll be able to see time cards without ever having to ask for them!

More Accurate Invoices/Payroll

With more accurate time counts, you can create invoices and settle payroll accounts with greater accuracy, saving you (and your clients) money and boosting the trustworthiness of your business. Clients expect the most accurate invoices you can possibly offer, as they won’t want to overpay for something when the extra cost is associated with poor time management or dishonest time tracking.

Accurate invoices keep everyone happy, including your bookkeeper. Many time tracking software programs and apps can integrate with financial programs like QuickBooks as well, making the entire process streamlined and accurate. Your bookkeeper will definitely thank you for more accurate numbers; it makes their job much simpler.

Clients will appreciate honesty, as will your wallet when it comes time to settle payroll accounts. If employees’ time is tracked through an app, you’ll know the numbers to be more accurate than manual tracking; ensuring that they’re being paid only what they’re owed.

Employee Accountability

Let’s be honest, sometimes employees aren’t truthful about their time cards. With manual tracking, it can be much more difficult to figure out whether or not someone’s being honest about how much time they’ve spent on a project. This can cause feelings of distrust between you and the team member, and even end up costing you extra money when you settle accounts.

Not to mention, it can cause the cost of the project to skyrocket well over budget. This is damaging not only for your own financial resources, but also for the client’s. Holding your employees accountable with time tracking software will guarantee their integrity and keep numbers as accurate as possible. Biometric time tracking would provide even more accurate numbers since biometric modalities cannot be faked. Biometric attendance can further reduce employee time theft and buddy punching

Project Management and Budgeting

Time tracking overall creates a better project and team management process and can help you budget out future projects with greater accuracy. Once you know how long certain processes take and which employees excel in which areas, you’ll be able to better delegate labor and financial resources for increased efficiency/productivity.

Budgeting is a necessary component to any project, not only to provide yourself with a number, but also to keep the clients aware of what the project may cost in its entirety. Most clients like to know ahead of time what they’ll be spending, so knowing what the process will cost can help you give them an accurate estimate of the overall cost.

Time is Your Greatest Resource

When you’re paid to do a job, you’re essentially selling blocks of time. You have a particular set of skills which a client is willing to pay you on an hourly basis to utilize. Time is your team’s greatest resource and the one which generates the most profit. The less time you spend on a project, the more profitable it becomes; leaving more time for other projects and other opportunities.

Not tracking or managing your time is just as dangerous as not tracking or managing your money. Time is money, after all, as the saying goes, and it’s the truth! Time tracking is vital to the overall success of any business, and should not be underestimated as a crucial component to effective teams.

Conclusion

Time tracking isn’t anything new, but the tools available to help the process become more efficient have evolved to the point where little human input is required. Some time tracking tools operate on advanced AI software, which allows the software to learn as it is used, maximizing efficiency and accuracy. If you’re not tracking time with one of these great apps or software programs, you’re truly doing yourself a disservice. Time is the greatest resource available to you, and proper management and tracking can make your business that much more efficient and profitable. Try time tracking software today and take the next step toward maximum productivity!