Manage Projects Efficiently and Get Paid Faster

Manage Projects Efficiently and Get Paid Faster

Late payments can play havoc with a company’s cash flow. Such disruption can result in shortages meaning there’s a lack of funds to reinvestment in the company or even difficulties paying bills and staff. Regardless, studies have shown that around 64% of small companies have experienced not being paid on invoices for 60 days or longer.

There are various reasons for late payments from clients. One reason is the client lacking funds themselves, while another potential reason is a lack of organization. The company doing the work is also sometimes at fault, such as delayed delivery, quality issues, or administrative problems. 

One way to ensure that you’re paid for projects on time is to run the project as efficiently as possible.

Define the Project Before Starting

One way to help ensure you get paid on time is to define the project before starting. You need to define the scope of the task, which materials are needed, how long it will take, and who will be working on the project.

By defining the project fully, you can give an accurate quote and completion deadline, meaning the client is less likely to have anything to contest when paying. Defining the project will also help ensure you get paid fairly for your work and have everything you need to do the job. 

Track Your Team

Manpower is one of the most important ingredients of just about any project. Your staff’s experience and skills are necessary to get the job done and even the most advanced technology cannot replace most human tasks. However, as important as manpower is for getting a project finished, it is also one of the most expensive aspects. Manpower can also be one of the most difficult variables to manage.

However, solutions like PK4 Tech’s time tracking software can help to make it much easier for you to track and manage your team. For example, the technology can let you know where an employee is at a particular time, what they have been working on, and how long they have spent on certain tasks.

This ability to monitor employees in such a way is beneficial for numerous reasons, including:

  • Error Reduction: It can be very easy to make errors when timesheets are created. People are unlikely to remember all the details of their working week, especially if they have been busy. Time tracking software will help to eliminate errors by tracking your employees’ actions for you. 
  • Improved Billing: Time trackers make it easier to track the amount of time working for clients. The software also makes it easier for you to send reports to your clients to keep up with the work being done and monitor the progress of the project themselves. With everything documented, clients are less likely to have a reason to delay their payments.
  • Monitor Productivity: The average employee will spend around 51% of their working day on unproductive tasks. It’s not necessarily their fault; people just won’t always realize how much time certain tasks are taking. With time tracking software, you can monitor how long employees are spending on tasks, helping you identify where they could be spending their time better.
  • Easy Processing: Processing timesheets can be a time-consuming and menial task for managers, meaning more important tasks are pushed aside. However, time-tracking software makes it much simpler for managers to approve timesheets. Instead of using paper sheets, managers instead have all the details they need on the screen in front of them. The software makes it easy to accept or reject timesheets at the touch of a button, and let employees know why their timesheet was rejected.
  • Budget Monitoring: It can be easy to go over budget if you’re not monitoring your expenses, but time tracking software makes it easy for you. With the right software, you can get the information you need at a glance, helping you make important decisions. 

Time tracking can help you manage your project more efficiently in numerous ways. In addition to the benefits already mentioned, the software can also produce comprehensive reports that give you the information you need to make impactful decisions. Not only that, but time-tracking software can also integrate with other systems, helping you get more value from them. Overall, the software can help you identify the most productive ways to work, while reducing errors and streamlining your processes. Your clients are more likely to pay on time with an efficiently managed process.

Why Time Management Is Increasingly Important In The Workplace

Why Time Management Is Increasingly Important In The Workplace

Whether in our work or home life, we all have the same limited amount of hours in the day, and most of us report feeling overwhelmed and rushed. Time management in this era of hyperconnectivity is, essentially, stress management.

So why is time management so important? How can we condense our workdays into short bursts of productivity so that we can enjoy our personal lives stress-free?

Managers worldwide need to solve this conundrum because, according to numerous studies, employees struggle with procrastination, inefficiency, and office hours invading their personal time.

Why time management is more important than ever

Time is money, it’s true, but there are some things money just can’t buy. One of them is your employee’s happiness. We’ve gathered a few interesting facts to shed light on how employees really feel at work nowadays and how it could be impacting your business:

  • Most employees work on weekends. Full-time employees typically work 8.5 hours Monday to Friday and 5.4 more hours per day on the weekend to cope with the increased workloads.
  • Employees are connected to their work 24/7. Surveys show that 66% of workers check their emails 7 days a week and are expected to reply within a day.
  • Employees don’t have enough time to interact with their spouses or children. This explains the skyrocketing divorce rate, and working from home doesn’t shield family members from this. Instead, stress levels rise even more as there’s no clear separation between home and work.
  • Employees dread going to work. 80% of employees hate having to go to work on Monday. By Friday, this feeling of unease only slightly decreases, with 60% feeling the same way.
  • Employees procrastinate to cope with stress. Procrastination increases in lower-income employees and during shorter employment periods. Virtually all employees spend close to an hour on social media or their phones during work hours.
  • Employees aren’t passionate or motivated by what they do. If they had financial freedom, 97% of workers would choose to leave their employer and line of work.

So what does all this mean for your business? Frustration at work can be linked to two major reasons: working too much and not being able to keep up, and working on the wrong things, increasing feelings of futility and dissatisfaction.

This is where smart project management comes in, and it all begins with prioritizing, scheduling, and keeping an eye on how tasks get done.

How to use time management to banish employee overwhelm

Parkinson’s law states that work will expand to fit the time allocated to it. Give employees one important task per day, and it will occupy their entire workday. Give them 12 tasks, and while they won’t be able to complete them all, they’ll finish more than half of them.

Sounds productive, right? Not if you take the employees’ feelings of burnout and overwhelm into account.

Sometimes, the best time management technique is learning to say “no” to adding anything else to your workers’ To-Do list.

So how can you motivate your workers to achieve more in less time? Apply only a few of the suggested changes below, and you’ll be amazed at the difference in productivity and employee satisfaction:

Use the power of scheduling. Planning out the day in detail is the most powerful tool of time management. Delegate your most important tasks for the day and follow along on the progress as employees log their time and work. Time tracking is essential for measuring how effectively things get done, yet, less than 17% of people make use of it.

Using a product like our Time Tracker helps companies keep track of how their employees are spending their time and ensure they are fairly compensated.

Leverage the most productive window. Many workers report working most effortlessly between 9 and 12 AM. By delegating the most strenuous work in the morning, you will already set up your employees’ day for success.

Estimate tasks correctly. We all fall into the trap of underestimating how long a task will actually take, and managers are no exception. If you’ve done similar tasks in the past, you could have a look at the logged time and base your future estimations on reality.

Factor in breaks. Employees aren’t robots, and they need recovery time throughout the workday. Keeping breaks and meal times in mind will take some of the pressure off your workers and show them they are valued. Logging breaks, lunchtime, and even managing paid time off (PTO) are intuitive functions within our Time Tracker.

It’s safe to say that time management is a skill that we’re all struggling to master. When managing our employees’ time, we should have more than productivity in mind. 

Any good leader will first and foremost protect their employees’ emotional and physical wellbeing while challenging them with just the right amount of work. Do it right, and this approach will boost your company’s growth while also making it a coveted working environment.

How Monitoring Breaks Can Help Optimize Work

How Monitoring Breaks Can Help Optimize Work

Productivity is a hot topic in the business world. We measure it, track it, and think of ways to get more of it. And if it doesn’t live up to our expectations, then our employees must not be working hard enough. 

But productivity isn’t just about hard work. Attending to your workers’ basic human needs is a win-win for everyone: strategic breaks are shown to improve decision making, focus, creativity, and ultimately the profitability of your company. 

Your employees need regular breaks, and it’s your job as their leader to make sure they take them in a way that doesn’t negatively affect your business or your employees’ quality of life. 

But when dealing with so many personality types – the ambitious overachiever, the slacker, the guy who doesn’t know how to use the Check-In/Check-Out functions properly – how do you ensure everyone gets treated fairly?

Let’s look at what types of breaks there are, what’s actually legal, and how you can best manage your employees’ breaks.

The main types of breaks you can use

Before setting up any kind of break, you need to make sure your plan aligns with your country’s laws and regulations. For example, US federal law doesn’t mandate any breaks during work hours, but individual states have their own regulations, like taking a 30-minute unpaid meal break if you’re working more than five hours. 

Breaks can range from 5 to 30 minutes, and they can be paid or unpaid. Your employee can take breaks for meal purposes or to rest from intense intellectual or physical work. Let’s talk about how you can track these breaks inside our Time Tracker.

Automatic break time

An automatic break is a break that managers can insert into the worker’s schedule at a specified time, according to the existing break time rules. The break time gets automatically deducted from user’s worked hours, regardless of what they chose to do with their time.

Automatic breaks are usually an unpaid time slot that’s reserved for meals. But since we’re not robots and need some flexibility in our lives, these types of breaks can cause trouble. 

Your employee might not understand this concept at first and clock out for an additional break, which could lead to misunderstandings and additional deducted time. Or certain managers could abuse their authority and make their employees work during a break time that’s rightfully theirs.

Manual break time

Another way you could approach breaks when tracking your employee’s work hours is by setting up a time interval that your employee can use as a break.

This works best for flexible jobs where strict schedules can’t be enforced – sales, customer service, etc.

So how does manual break monitoring work?

If your employee clocks out and back in within the amount of time you’ve allotted for breaks, then his break time is paid. If the break time is exceeded, those minutes get accounted as unpaid. 

You can find more information on using our software’s Check In/Out function in this article.

Of course, manual breaks work best if clear rules are set in place. So let’s look at some ways you can set clear ground rules for your workers.

How to optimize work breaks for employees

Project management is tricky – you’re dealing with deadlines, demotivated workers, and catering to your employee’s needs. So how do you increase productivity by optimizing breaks and making sure that your employees make the most out of those breaks?

Create rules and communicate them well

  • Do your employees know that their lunch break is automatically deducted from their schedule, and are they aware of the time they need to go on break?
  • Do your employees need to clock out for bathroom and smoking breaks, and how far can they go from the building?
  • Will your employees get paid if they work during their breaks instead of taking time off?

Time tracking your employee’s activity should be based on reality, and managers have the responsibility to oversee how workers spend their time – whether they’re working too much or too little.

Experiment with break length and time

Imagine a restaurant employee taking a 20-minute break during the busiest time of the evening. That would certainly hurt your business’s productivity and your customer satisfaction. 

Analyze which parts of the schedule are slowest in terms of customers, and set most of the breaks at that time. You could also take a look at your employees’ task management and see where most of the work happens and where productivity starts to dip. This could also offer you an idea of when short breaks are most effective.

Listen to feedback

You may be creating and enforcing the rules, but your employees aren’t machines. It’s always in your best interest to listen to how your breaks – or lack of them – may influence your employees’ motivation and productivity.

Time tracking is essential to all parts of a business, including breaks. Our Time Tracker’s multiple features, including setting automatic breaks and using the Check In/ Out function to allow for manual work breaks will give you clarity on how much time your employee is spending on rest and rejuvenation.

As you use time tracking over a time period, you will be able to analyze your employees time entries and breaks. You will see that allowing breaks and using time tracking to identify the optimal time for breaks is good both for your business and for your employees. 

Photo by Redd on Unsplash

5 ways to manage your business while on vacation!

5 ways to manage your business while on vacation!

Vacation time isn’t just a perk for employees – business owners and entrepreneurs need a break just as much, if not more. They are a time for spending much-needed time with your family and/or friends as well as for de-stressing and revitalizing yourself, while refreshing your mind with new ideas. But not only is it common for small business owners to not take vacations, they are known to worry when they do take one.

But the fact is that a vacation is one of the best things that you can do for yourself, your business and your customers:

  • A vacation gives you a physical and mental break.
  • You’ll learn that your employees and customers can live without you for a few days. Perhaps, you’ll even discover a key employee who can be your trusted lieutenant.
  • You’ll come back with a refreshed perspective and new ideas for your business
  • Most importantly, you’ll avoid burnout and resentment that can destroy employee and customer relationships.

With all the technology available today, you can thwart vacation anxiety and go on a relaxing vacation with things running smoothly in your absence. Here are some tips to get rid of vacation anxiety while you’re away, whether you’re relaxing on the beach, hiking up those mountains or chasing animals on safari.

  1. Choose the right person to hold the fort for you: The absolute first thing that you should do is to select a trusted employee to stand in for you. Make sure that it’s someone who knows your business well. Ensure that you transition smoothly by going over routine and unexpected tasks with her/him. Figure out what issues constitute an emergency where s/he should get in touch with you right away.
  2. Communicate with your customers and staff: Problems arise if customers expect you to be around but can’t get in touch. Tell them about your vacation plans in advance. Remind them before you leave. Let them know who’ll be in charge and what they should expect. Make sure you tell your employees too. Keep them informed of how much/little time you plan to spend on work-related matters. Clarify your expectations, so that your team knows how and when to reach out to you.
  3. Set boundaries for yourself: Just as you set boundaries for your customers and employees, set boundaries for yourself. Forty percent of travelers agreed that their smartphone was the most important thing that they take on vacation. And that they check work emails often. But let’s face it, it’s not a vacation if you stay glued to your phone all day. If you’ve committed to staying in touch via email every day, pick convenient time slots and stick with it. If you plan on spending an hour every day on work, ideally pick a 30-minute slot in the morning when the rest of your vacation group is getting ready and a 30-minute slot in the evening when you can check emails, calls, chats. Avoid the temptation to check in more frequently.
  4. Manage your phone and email: You may be on vacation, but the rest of your world isn’t.
    • Set up an email auto-responder and a voice mail message clearly stating the dates that you will be out of reach
    • Tell people that you will get back to them after you return if it is a non-urgent matter
    • Make sure that the message has details of who they should get in touch with for urgent matters
    • If there is an issue that you need to deal with, do it in the time that you’ve set apart for work
    • Only respond to critical matters. Make a note of the other matters, so that you can deal with them after you get back
    • If there is something really urgent and critical, then a face to face meeting with your stand-in or other employees or customers may be necessary. Use Facetime. Google Hangouts, Google Duo or Skype for a live video-chat.
  5. Stay in the loop with collaboration tools: If your team uses a web-based collaboration tool such as Trello, Asana, Slack or Evernote, use it to stay in the loop – but within the boundaries you’ve set for yourself. If your team uses project management or time tracking tools, you can check your daily/weekly reports. Again, within the time boundaries that you’ve set for yourself. With access to tools like this, you’ll realize that you can troubleshoot in real time, without being tied to your office desk. And that your business is running just fine.

Running a business on vacation, may be a challenge. But it’s definitely something that can be done. All it needs is some planning and preparation and making use of technology to stay in touch. So if you’re off on a vacation, go on. Have a great time!

EU time tracking ruling: what it means for employees and employers

EU time tracking ruling: what it means for employees and employers

Justice of the European Union (ECJ) ruled last month that the member countries must establish detailed methods of tracking the hourly work of employees so that they can be properly compensated for time worked.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit by the Federación de Servicios de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), a Spanish trade union, against the Spanish subsidiary of Deutsche Bank. The main issues in question-related to calculating overtime hours – 54% of which goes unrecorded in Spain – and protecting obligatory rest.  “The Member States must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured,” the court said in its ruling.

The ECJ ruling is explicitly intended to protect the worker against potential workplace abuses. It is an effort to enforce the European Working Time Directive, which restricts employers from making employees work more than 48 hours a week, and grants people at least 11 consecutive hours of rest every day.

What the ECJ ruling means

The ECJ ruling extends to all companies operating in the EU. The ruling does not specify any guidelines for how employers should record work hours for their employees. In most cases, companies will need a clock-in/clock-out system that would allow them to monitor when employees start and end work, and when people have breaks. Employers will need to know employees’ exact work hours.

At first sight, this may seem cumbersome and backward. But given the technology available today, this could actually be a good idea, for both employers and employees. The “punch clock” has evolved, and businesses and employees don’t have to sacrifice contemporary technical flexibility for exact timekeeping. Modern time and attendance tracking software, often on the cloud, work on mobile phones. Clocking in and out is a matter of a tap on your smartphone screen or on a web page. So even if you are checking emails at home or taking a call from your boss, tracking that time isn’t really an inconvenience. Many of the software systems are priced such that small businesses can afford them. And most provide great analytical tools.

For employees

From an employee standpoint, there’s definitely a lot to be excited about.

Mobile and web time tracking

Mobile and web time tracking

Accurate time tracking provides irrefutable, objective proof against unlawful overtime. Time tracking thus becomes a tool towards building fairer, more accountable workplaces that help protect employee safety and health.

Moving beyond just clocking in and out, good time tracking can detail the time that employees spend on different tasks, when they take breaks and how long they last. It can help document off-site and off-hours work, as well as work-related travel, all of which are frequently overlooked. Basically, it gives employees full visibility into their work schedules – allowing them to address unhealthy workloads and the associated stress, anxiety and exhaustion that come with it.

For employers

Analyze employee time

Time Tracking reports

Companies can use time tracking to track employee working hours. It makes payroll much more accurate. Billing customers for work done is now much clearer and transparent and all hours worked can now be billed. The time tracking data collected is a great source of information on project budgets, project status, progress of works, employee productivity and many other aspects that are crucial for business success. For managers, it may make sense to combine data on the quantity and task breakdown of hours worked by employees with productivity information. It may turn out, for example, that a company would be better off with more workers keeping shorter hours than with an overworked team that’s less effective because of stress and exhaustion.

Conclusion

Time tracking doesn’t have to be tedious and cumbersome. With the right approach, you can make it an integral part of your business. Most makers of time tracking software tell customers that it’s vital to make it’s use mandatory to get people into the habit of tracking time, and that the data must be checked regularly to weed out abuses and negligence. If EU companies take the ECJ’s ruling seriously and apply it properly, it could do a world of good to their employees and their economies.