You may be running a small company or a big global business; keeping track of your employees’ time is a tough task. But time-tracking is a very important activity to understand how the time is being spent. It is key to gaining insight, tapping the highest productivity, and maintaining a healthy workflow. It’s a fact that tracking time spent on various tasks is almost as crucial as the ability to manage those tasks.
Imagine if a project manager could know how much time each task will take. Won’t it help in planning the timelines and resources accordingly? It’s important for organizations to use time tracking software to calculate effort, resource utilization, and provide correct payroll to the employees. Implementing good time management software also aids in improving productivity and accountability in employees.
Benefits of Using Time Tracking Software for your Business
Time scheduling and tracking is an effective method of encouraging your team to be accountable while working remotely. But accountability is just the beginning. Time management software also ensures project success and reduces any chances of potential losses.
1. Develop time management habits
Learning to achieve that illusive “work-life” balance is the key to successful projects and life. Many people end up putting in many extra hours than they are paid for. This is because of incorrect resourcing and planning. But that’s the only option when timelines are looming large. Time tracking helps you to be clear and honest with your own self about how productively you’re spending your day. It makes you utilize your work hours efficiently your value your home time better.
2. Plan in a more comprehensive manner to stay on track
Creating detailed and well-thought-out project plans is very important to know accurate milestones and project timelines. It is also important to make accurate estimates of how much time each task will take. This information is equally important for your team and the stakeholders. To do this, you need to measure your team’s actual effort or time spent on various tasks or projects. This information is very useful to ensure that the projects stay on track and the managers are up to date on the status. Additionally, you can improve project estimates for future projects in the pipeline based on previous ones, which is possible only if there are accurate time entries.
3. Maintain transparency into work processes
Making time entries a part of your routine helps to make your business operation more transparent. It offers you insights into the tasks that are completed and how much time it took. Moreover, you can also begin to understand which activities are usually pushed behind on priority or on the back burner. Therefore, time tracking software provides the bird’s-eye view or the bigger picture for the team members. They can look at their workload and decide how to optimize their productivity. A good time tracking software will come in handy for this. It will help you manage and track time for your employees while offering insights and transparency required for seamless project delivery.
4. Bill more accurately
How else can time tracking be beneficial? Whatever effort your team is putting into a project is billed to the client. Imagine if your team misses including some hours in the time reports. Time, effort, and money lost because of inaccurate reporting, calculation, or because of late timesheets can cost a lot in the long run. So, don’t let these losses negate your employees’ hard work by eating into the organization’s profits. Use the right time tracking software to make precise estimates and bills.
5. Keep your projects profitable
Mostly in a client services business, pricing is done per hour or per resource, which also highlights the importance of time. Every project takes a certain number of hours to complete, and every hour has a cost, depending on what is the cost of your resources. To ensure that your business is profitable, you must make sure that the price being charged to the client is more than the cost that you are incurring. How can you figure this out? Only by calculating the total hours invested in the project. And this is where time tracking comes in. A good time tracking software helps you keep track if your project is within the set budget or not. You can also identify any scope creeps or red flags and make amends before the project derails completely.
6. Improved Scheduling
It is the best if your team operates on trust – especially in times when most of the organizations have remote workers. Having said that, it is not possible to train your team to do so. All the employees may not report on time, some may login late at work, or leave early. So, how can you control how many hours they put in towards productive output? How can a project manager schedule resources accurately for a specific project? Using time tracking software can save you and your organization a lot of money. It improves the scheduling process, thus raising your profit margins.
7. Improve workflows
Time tracking also provides information you may need to evaluate your organization’s workflows. As a project manager, you can begin with the original project timeline, then compare the actual output. This helps in pinpointing the areas or particular processes that may need improvement. When the workflows are better, both full-time employees and freelance resources can utilize their time more efficiently by streamlining their efforts. It also helps to clear any roadblocks or challenges that may result in excessive time being spent on some tasks.
8. Avoid scope creeps
Scope creeps can completely put your project off-track and can be a big disadvantage to any service industry organization. But the question is – why do scope creeps happen? When you don’t analyze all the components or probabilities of a project properly in the planning phase, scope creeps may happen. Because of this, companies end up spending more money and extra man hours because of the new requirements. With time tracking software, it becomes easier to plan for any such unforeseen expenditures or extra effort that you did not add or create a buffer for.
9. Making more precise estimates
It’s a given that no client would like it if you over-promise, under-deliver, or miss deadlines. Agreeing to realistic expectations right at the beginning is vital for maintaining a good rapport and a long-term relation with your clients. If you are able to estimate how long a project would take, then you can plan your team size and total effort in a better way. This also means that you won’t overbook resources and create accurate schedules. A time management software helps to ensure that you only take on that much work which your team can handle.
10. Avoid Burnout
Besides improving productivity, it’s important to find how much time your resources are spending on the overall billable work. This helps in flagging when a resource is overallocated and could be nearing burnout. Time tracking software can help a project and resource manager to plan and delegate work in a more balanced manner. This will make sure that your team is happy, productive and is being utilized optimally. A time tracking software that provides visibility into project status, performance, and utilization will help in identifying your team’s strengths and weaknesses. This way, you can drive various process improvements and critical projects that help your business.
Track Time with a Leading Time Tracking Software – eResource Scheduler
You may be handling a remote team or working from the office. But this top-rated resource management software enables you and your team to track their time towards specific tasks. If you want to streamline your processes, bring visibility while working with distributed teams, or get more advantage out of your own day; then eResource Scheduler is your best bet. You can use this time management software to plan your projects, schedule and allocate resources, monitor utilization, productivity, and a lot more. The tool’s client-server architecture allows multiple users to work, communicate freely, and share data in real-time. Try it for free and see how this tool can help your organization and business.