Every business tracks essential metrics like revenue, expenses, and productivity. It makes operations easy and efficient in a cost-effective way. If you track it, you can measure it objectively, understand the factors that affect the metric, and identify the problem areas.
Time is an equally valuable metric when it comes to business. In the words of Steve Jobs, “time is the most valuable resource we all have”. So, that’s one metric that you can’t miss or ignore even when measuring your workforce’s productivity and efficiency.
Employee time tracking software lets you see the hours, resources, and human resources spent on a particular task. You can then act upon it and improve your business processes.
This is especially important for small businesses that work with temporary/contractual staff and freelancers paid on an hourly or per-project basis. Knowing how long someone has worked is just one of the benefits of using time tracking software. Let’s see what other benefits the software has to offer.
Increase Profitability
Effective time tracking can show you where your money is being spent. If something isn’t working the way you’d planned, you can re-prioritize or re-assign resources. This is especially important in monitoring project budgets. It is simple. You get the amount of time spent on a particular task and the money gained from it. Deduct all staff salaries and other expenses. If you’re making a profit, you’re okay. If not, it’s time to re-assign resources to some other more profitable task.
Knowing How Employees Spend Their Time
This may come across as suspicious and may not be seen in a positive light. Tracking your employees’ time does not mean you don’t trust them and that you suspect dishonesty. It is just that people are people, and they may stray or waste their time on unimportant or unproductive tasks.
The software gives you a complete picture of how and where your resources are being spent and you can set priorities right. It helps improve your employee and your team’s productivity by focusing on more important tasks.
Know How Long a Certain Task Takes
If you are a contracting company rendering services to clients in specific areas like web development, design, etc. it is important to give correct estimates and quotes. This is only possible if you know how long it takes to complete a task.
A time tracking solution effectively measures the time spent on various tasks to give the right estimate to clients. This can make a lot of difference in getting client orders. The more accurate your estimates are, the more trustworthy you appear to clients.
Avoid Micromanagement
The benefits of time tracking are apparent. However, manual time tracking can be quite a hassle. Asking employees to log their time, send work reports, and then checking each entry is not just arduous but consumes a lot of time.
Automating this process using an employee time tracking software saves you from micromanaging your employees, which your employees will also appreciate. They don’t have to worry about sending daily reports as they have software running in the background without disrupting their work.
Calculate Salary Accurately
This is especially useful if you’re dealing with freelancers or temporary staff paid on an hourly or daily basis based on their output. Time tracking helps you effectively track the time they have spent working and calculate their wages accurately. This prevents time theft and exaggerating hours, resulting in loss of money for the organization.
Integrating data from the software to your payroll system saves you from the hassle of manually computing the salaries. This saves a lot of time, and as we all know, time is equal to money in business!
Effective Planning and Budgeting
Of course, time tracking software alone won’t help you with project planning, but it provides valuable data while doing it. Work estimates, quotes, project timelines, and deadlines- all the information that you need to keep your projects and plans well balanced and budgeted can be found in one place.
Contrary to what people may think, time tracking software is not spyware and does not in any way violate employee privacy. It’s just an app running in the background while people go about their daily work without causing any disruption or anyone noticing it is even there.
Time tracking software is designed to help you manage your projects, resources, and teams better. They are simple and can be easily integrated via an API into your project management and business software for convenience and better management of resources.
