Every small business has a unique set of features and goals. But regardless of this uniqueness, small businesses share many similar objectives. They all aspire to thrive and be profitable and, hence, they have to:
- Reduce costs
- Increase productivity
- Design realistic plans
- Make evidence-based decisions
These aims may not always be easy to fulfill, especially if you don’t have enough management experience. The good news is that they all can be fairly quickly attained with a timesheet app.
To choose a perfect software tool for your company, you should identify your team’s needs and focus on those performance areas that you wish to improve. Below we described three of the most widespread problems small companies face and explained which features of a timesheet app may help you address them better.
How to Choose a Timesheet App for a Small Business
1. Avoid Excess Overhead
It costs a great deal just to maintain ongoing business operations and do everything necessary for the company to stay afloat. You have to purchase utilities, rent facilities, pay taxes and do the accounting. Luckily, overhead expenses incurred by some of these repetitive operations can be reduced through software-based automation.
A smart timesheet app offers plenty of opportunities to streamline the accounting and HR processes in your company. Consider actiTIME as an example. This tool allows for:
- Accurate tracking of billable time,
- Automatic invoice generation,
- Automated payroll and PTO accrual,
- Smooth-running time off management.
By digitalizing these procedures, you have a good chance to speed them up and minimize the risk of errors during data collection. In this way, you’ll save a lot of time and a large portion of the money spent merely to support the business.
2. Prevent Project Overruns
Successful project realization gives small businesses an opportunity to prove themselves and advance in the market. However, schedule and cost overruns pose an immense threat to project delivery efforts in any company. They may happen due to multiple reasons, yet inaccurate estimation, inadequate resource planning and poor performance management are probably the major ones.
If you want your small team to deliver projects on time, stay within the budget and achieve superior outcomes, assume adopting a timesheet app with the following features:
- Progress tracking – To make sure everything goes according to the plan, you need to monitor team performance closely. But if your project contains dozens of tasks, just reviewing your employees’ timesheets may not be the most convenient way to go. In this case, such a feature for progress monitoring as the Kanban board will benefit you tremendously – it visualizes workloads and workflows, allowing for a straightforward performance monitoring.
- Estimate tracking – To comply with initial estimates, you should always keep tabs on how much time and money the team spends. With automatic reminders and relevant reports that a timesheet app may offer, estimate tracking will become an effortless task. For instance, you can configure actiTIME to notify users about upcoming deadlines, as well as the risks of schedule and budget overruns. Besides, this timesheet tool generates various useful reports, including the one for comparing your estimates with actual time spent on projects.
- Time and financial reports – The reporting functionality also assists during the estimation process itself. Time and cost reports provide high-quality historical data that you may utilize to carry out analogous estimation and develop credible schedules and budgets for future projects.
- Project and resource planning – Some timesheet tools include advanced functionality for project management. It enables users to thoroughly plan their activities, design timelines and create detailed work breakdowns. Yet even basic functionality for work scope management can help you go a long way – it lets users design their work structure, assign tasks to responsible team members and get a full picture of the overall range of work.
3. Fight Low Productivity
A productive team is key to attaining consistent positive results. If your employees aren’t productive, your business will struggle not only to increase its output but also to maintain it at an optimal level.
To promote productivity, you need to ensure that:
- Individual employees use their working hours effectively,
- Your business doesn’t suffer due to time theft,
- Workloads are well-distributed among team members,
- And there are no bottlenecks in the company’s work processes.
Besides the functionality for project and work scope management we’ve already discussed above, software features that may help you attain these objectives are time tracking, clock-in / clock-out and productivity reports:
- Time tracking is the core feature of every timesheet app, and if your goal is to boost team productivity, you should strive to track working hours as accurately as possible. For this purpose, some apps incorporate simple-to-use automatic timers that let users keep a record of every minute they spend on tasks. With automatic hour tracking, you’ll have a more realistic overview of your employees’ time use behaviors.
- Clock-in and clock-out functionality allows for capturing the exact time when your team members start and end their workdays. Some of the time clock apps also support GPS tracking and facial recognition – these are highly valuable features in case poor employee attendance and time theft are a big concern of yours.
- Productivity charts and performance reports depict time tracking statistics in a readable and visually appealing manner so that it’s easy to process and analyze data. With these reports, you can evaluate team behaviors and identify management inefficiencies. But to do so well, be sure to define what productivity means for you, choose a suitable method to quantify it and formulate a set of relevant questions to drive the analysis process in advance.
All the data and features for an in-depth analysis of team productivity can be accessed through actiTIME. Feel free to sign up for a free trial today and make certain for yourself that this smart timesheet app offers tremendous values to your small business!
