Let’s face it – time tracking isn’t easy. It doesn’t come naturally for most people, and you may be afraid that your employees won’t be open to the idea. But even if it looks tedious at first, it’s a habit that, once enforced, will bring tremendous benefits for your business.
Time tracking is more than just checking on individual employees – it creates a complex picture of how your projects are doing, and it even helps you determine whether you’re charging what your business is worth.
Here are 6 reasons why adopting time tracking is important in most lines of work:
1. Time tracking helps spot productivity issues.
Tracking your employees’ time is the best way to track their behavior and spot potential problems. With the help of a simple product like the Time Tracker, you can identify who’s late, who’s going on breaks more than they should, or taking too many sick days.
Going into the specifics, you can easily check how much time your employees spend on their assigned tasks and make sure that they’re actually doing something productive.
Which leads us to our next point: measuring time is just the first step – it’s how your employees spend that time that matters.
2. Time tracking helps management find employees who are open to new tasks.
So your employees have come into the office, they’ve punched their virtual cards – but are they really there to do the work? It’s easy to waste time and hide behind easy tasks instead of tackling challenging projects.
This is where your task management skills come in. It’s your job to discover those employees with light workloads, and time tracking software will allow you to see what your workers are doing. With one glance, you can get an idea of who is working on essential tasks and who isn’t and reprioritize to fit your new goals.
3. Time tracking ensures fair payroll.
When handling payroll, you have to be careful about many things: overtime, paid leave, paid or unpaid breaks, etc. Nobody likes to be exploited, and without time tracking in place, it’s nearly impossible to pay your employees fairly: either them or your business will suffer.
Time tracking software takes a lot of the guesswork out of payroll and streamlines many management and HR processes.
4. With time tracking in place, you can bill clients accurately.
Is your business strategy based on “guesstimations”? When charging their clients, many business owners scratch their heads and estimate a value that would be good for the company and satisfactory for the client.
But is this number based on actual data?
With time tracking, you’ll have a detailed record of your work. Based on this record, you can accurately bill your client with an invoice that reflects your efforts. Should any arguments arise, you can show your client the actual work that went into the project.
5. Time tracking helps you make better estimates for future projects.
Estimating how much time and effort should go into specific projects is a tricky business. Even if you have solid work experience, you might still end up overloading your team with extra work and exceeding the costs and hours assigned for a project.
Clients change their minds, and unexpected problems derail projects all the time. However, you can still significantly improve your project estimates and learn from your mistakes by tracking the time spent on specific tasks and projects and making adjustments for future similar work.
6. Time tracking will enable you to quote fair prices.
Once you go through all the steps above and analyze your company’s budget and expenses, you may realize that you’re charging far too little for your company’s products or services.
That may sting at first – but it’s for the best. Your employees’ time is costing you, so why not have better rates that reflect your company’s efforts? With time tracking, you’ll find that charging more is evidence-based, rather than just covering black holes intuitively.
More profit and happy employees? Yes, please.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, time tracking is all about creating new opportunities. When areas that need improvement are staring you right in the face, it’s easy to take steps for better productivity.
Enabling your employees to log their time may need some troubleshooting at first, but rest assured that you can always make the necessary adjustments inside our Time Tracker for when workers forget to log in or enter the wrong data. So embrace the process, and watch how time tracking transforms your business.