Benefits of Time Tracking

You’ve probably used the phrase “time is money” a few times in your career. Did you know that the quote was originally used by Benjamin Franklin in a handbook “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One?”

It was true then, and it’s even more true now when you have many tools at your disposal that help you get a grasp of time. In an era of time tracking, you are provided with all the  information you’ll need to improve your company’s performance, and therefore, earn more.

So you know the correlation between time and money, but how does that work exactly? Here are some benefits you have from time tracking that, ultimately, lead to performance improvement and money earning:

Tracking Employees’ Time

First and foremost – it’s what an employee time tracking software does, right? Use time tracker to always know what your team is working on. With Workpuls, you can split their work into separate tasks and projects and then assign the right employees to those assignments. With each project, you have a preview of the hourly rate of assigned workers, project budget and a productivity estimation.

Team Performance Review

So you’ve gathered some performance data and now it’s time for a review. This is where areas needing improvement come to life. You might have noticed that your content writer spends more time formatting an article than writing it, and it’s a clear sign they might be struggling with using Google Docs.

Of course, you’re not using employee time tracker software just to see what’s going wrong, but also what’s going well with your employees. Have you noticed Karen needs less and less time finishing those spreadsheets? That is an improvement worthy of a praise.

The handy tool Workpuls has in its’ pocket is the unique employee login, which gives your workers access to their data so they can engage in an evaluation and further discuss where they think they’re encountering problems and what’s the best way to overcome them.

Just make sure to not fall victim to using numbers as a sole indicator of performance, as you might forget that numbers don’t mean much if they aren’t used correctly. So it’s important that you focus on the results your team achieves, which you should back up by those numbers to create a proper feedback.

Protecting Your Earnings

Clients love knowing from the start the amount of time your team will need for a project. But let’s be real – it’s almost impossible to predict the time. In fact, it’s a psychological fact that humans are bad at estimating time.

While overestimating the time is bad – clients don’t like paying for work hat could have been finished sooner, underestimating is even worse for you. For example, if some small tasks takes your team even just 20 minutes more than predicted, and they do such tasks every day, well, do the math. Those are the hours you’re NOT getting paid for.

Time tracking application gives your clients an exact payroll calculation of the time spent on the project. Your team will love you for all those minutes of extra work you didn’t forget they put into.

Also, after some time of collecting data, your project time estimations will be more accurate with all the performance evidence you gathered. You should still use time tracking solutions to get the right invoice, but in time you’ll be sure your estimations won’t cause employees’ burnout.

Being a Pro Boss

Clients love asking questions. Love? I mean ADORE. Sometimes it goes way over the line so you’re feeling like you know the sound of their voice better than your mom’s. You get everyday questions like – What’s the status of my project? When it will be done? Money?

While maybe you can understand their worries and need for micromanagement, it’s suffocating and distracting from other stuff you have going on on your schedule. Here a simple time tracker comes to your aid again. With a client login feature Workpuls has, you can give your clients a gated access to their projects and all the information regarding it – employees assigned, budget estimate, hours spent… They have an overview in real time, so there’s no need for you to sit by your phone or email answering those questions like you’re an Q&A page.

In Conclusion

Tracking time means transforming it into objective metrics so you can measure it, and to measure is to understand. Understanding it means you can influence it – so there you have it. Time tracking is the best tool for performance improvement you can have up your sleeve.