Half a century ago, paper organizers became a trend of work organization. Nowadays, in the gadgetized world, we tend to use computers and smartphones for most everyday tasks. Software and mobile apps offer many advantages over paper organizers and are much more convenient for performance management in terms of flexibility and app integration.
Default productivity tools such as digital calendars and note apps are ineffective and outdated. Separate tools for time tracking, project management, accounting and more will give you a headache. In this article, we’ll talk about time tracking software and look into how to use it effectively to cover most business needs and increase productivity.
What Is Time Tracking Software?
Time tracking software or time trackers are tools that allow you to monitor and document the amount of time spent on activities. It is used by freelancers, hourly workers, and businesses to capture time spent on tasks, streamline project management processes and calculate payments.
If you’ve never used this kind of software before, you might wonder why you might need it. Surveys prove that time trackers deal with poor personal time management habits. It is known that daily time tracking improves productivity by 80% and accuracy by 66%. In other words, time logging makes employees more engaged and disciplined in the workplace. But this is far not the only advantage of time tracking software.
Online timesheet interface in actiTIME where every user can select task parameters
they want to see in their timesheets
Another benefit is that time trackers identify unimportant habits and time theft. A study conducted among the UK office workers shows that the average amount of productive work time equals 3 hours out of 8 working hours. According to the respondents, the rest of their workday they check social media, browse news sites, and discuss work with office mates. While your employees spend time on non-working activities, your business loses thousands of dollars monthly due to time fraud.
The list of advantages goes on and on. Read on to learn how time trackers can benefit small and medium-sized teams and help you increase productivity and business revenue.
How to Increase Productivity Using Time Tracking Software
Modern time tracking software offers more than simple time trackers and timesheets. To get the most of the tools and increase productivity in your team, stick to the following rules.
1. Track Where the Time Goes
As a project manager, you can create projects, break them into tasks, set time budgets, assign tasks to the team members and see how they perform. Use reports to convert the data into charts and spreadsheets and think of ways to improve the workflow, increase productivity and get the most of every workday.
Reports dashboard in actiTIME – set up real-time data widgets
and add report shortcuts for quick access
2. Plan Your Work
Modern time tracking software offers configurable reports where you can group the data by departments, projects or periods of time and compare results to evaluate your team’s efficiency.
Let’s say you launch similar projects and assign them to the same team every month. If you group the data by months and compare it against each other, you can determine if your team performance improved or got worse and investigate further into the reasons.
Work Assignments interface in actiTIME where you can see employee capacity
and manage their workload online
3. Calculate Wages
Now we are talking about advanced functionality. As the name suggests, most time tracking software provides time tracking and reporting only, but businesses need more than that.
First of all, flexible hours and freelancing are taking over the world, so businesses need tools to calculate wages according to the time spent. What’s more, accounting software comes at a price, so most startups and even middle-sized companies can’t afford it.
Advanced time and project management solutions have already adjusted to the newest trends, so they support wage accounting based on the hourly pay rates. In actiTIME, for example, you can run reports to prepare payroll in a single app.
4. Invoice Your Clients
Wages are based on the work hours, so does client billing. In business time trackers, you can bill and invoice your clients in a single app. Use your data to create a new report or use a template to generate the invoices in one click.
5. Keep Track of Your PTO
Time off calculations is another advanced feature that many modern time trackers are missing. It makes sense because different countries and states have their own PTO policies, making it hard to fit them into a single system.
However, in actiTIME, you can make a one-time setup and adjust PTO calculations for your needs. What’s more, not only do accountants and project managers have access to the PTO balance, but workers may review it too.
6. Improve Time Management & Estimation Skills
Accurate time estimation is the best friend of any project manager. To effectively distribute the workload between your team members, you need to have a clear idea of how much time each task may require. Modern time trackers allow you to set time estimates for upcoming tasks and compare them against similar tasks in the past or the actual time spent.
Project managers can also use reports to monitor the progress of the current projects, compare the amount of work and hours left before the estimated time is out. When you reveal the problems in the early stages of development, it’s much easier to adapt accordingly.
7. Track Time on the Go
Not every employee works behind their desk. Consultants and event managers travel a lot, but they need to make sure that all their efforts are fairly paid. Time trackers that support browser and mobile apps and sync the data between the devices are a real life-saver.
With actiTIME mobile apps, your employees can submit work and leave time, manage tasks and review timesheet data on the go. If they don’t have internet access, they can still record their time expenses and the app will sync the data when they are back online.
Where Focus Goes, Money Flows
Any business needs smart resource management, especially small businesses that need to grow, not just keep afloat. Small and middle-sized companies tend to save money on productivity tools and use old-school Excel sheets or switch between several free tools, which is ineffective and time-consuming.
Keeping this in mind, we created actiTIME – time tracking software that meets most project management and accounting needs and helps you increase productivity multifold.
We offer a free plan for teams with up to 3 users and a free and fully functional 30-day trial. Try out our all-in-one performance management solution for your business or request a product demo.
