The belief that tracking time will make us slower instead of making faster is nothing but a fallacy. In the real world, time tracking allows you to measure your working pace, adjust with the deadlines and constantly enable you to challenge yourself to surpass your previous work performance.
From the very beginning to the ending of a project, you will encounter some common scenarios like “How many hours we need to complete this project?”, “Which employee can do it faster?”, “Who is the most qualified to delegate a task?”, “How to improve my quotes and estimates?” and many more.
In this article, we will be discussing the benefits of a time tracking software that can assure you that you will be able to find the answers to these queries easily.
What are the Benefits of a Time Tracker Software?
As we are managing our business with a time tracker solution, we have found the following factors, gleaned from our experience, to be useful.
Pushing employees to meet the pressing deadlines
If your employees are using time management software, then they can see the status of their tasks from the software dashboard or from the task lists. This will propel them to submit his or her delegated task in due course.
Helping your teammates to hop onto the higher priority tasks
It’s a quite common phenomenon that after finishing a certain task, your employees can’t figure out on which task they should concentrate on or get started with. This is exactly where a time tracking tool comes to the rescue. With this, they can not only see the next tasks but can also see the priority level (low, medium and high) of a task. Thus, an employee can gauge his or her time for his/her assigned tasks and can hop onto the next task which requires the higher priority.
Improving quotes and estimates for a sound relationship with the clients
Tracking time on every bit and piece of your project will enable you to generate reports on different types of tasks taken to complete. Based on this report, you can easily make your assumptions and thus can estimate the time to finish a project giving improved quotes to your customers.
Measuring billable hours accurately
If your team is taking unnecessarily long time to complete a certain project or a series of tasks then billing your customers with respect to that time won’t give off good results. Your client can lose trust in you as he or she might think that you are billing him or her more than you deserve. Therefore, you need to identify and cut down the non-billable hours.
The good news is if you keep measuring your tasks properly then you can bill your client according to the net amount of time and work, done by your entire team.
Avoiding “Requirement Creep”
The lack of well-definition, well-documentation, and control may lead you to the feature creep problem which may gradually grow over the time. Adding to that, scope creep works as a backlog of your project.
According to PMI’s 2018 Pulse of the Profession survey, 52% of projects had experienced scope creep problem.
As you will be tracking time for each of the tasks, it will be easier for your client to understand the fact that not to raise any requirement creep.
Paying freelancers or contractors for what they really deserve
With a time tracker solution, you can track the total amount of working time of your contractors or freelancers. This ensures that you are paying them for what they really deserve or for what they have actually done. This can be implemented the same way your staffs are filling the time sheets out in the same time tracking system.
Monitoring the status of all tasks at a time
When you are managing different projects at a time, it becomes really tough to know the status of a task on demand. You will feel that tasks are coming on your way and gradually getting out of your way.
However, with advanced search options, you will just have to put the name of a certain task or the name of the user associated with the task on the search bar and hit the enter button to rescue a lost task of your way. Besides, a time tracking tool with a dedicated dashboard will help you get a bird’s eye view of all the tasks of all projects.
Improving project schedules to a more realistic time-frame
No matter how dexterous and experienced you are to estimate your project schedules correctly, there will always be uncertainty to complete a job within a specified time-frame. If you fail to submit your projects within the specified time period then your client will consider you ‘unprofessional’.
On the other hand, if you do have enough data on previously completed projects or tasks then you can determine the expected time to finish a project and thus setting project schedules to a more realistic time-frame becomes easier for you.
Getting the opportunity to compare projects and improve efficiency
With the past data history of previously done projects, you can compare your currently completed projects so that you can measure whether you are taking the same time or less. This will surely pave the way to challenge yourself along with your entire team to do the same task within less amount of time.
Sidestepping overloading problems
When getting assigned with tasks, a good number of people take them with good hearts – it’s because such people love to help others. But as time passes by, those tasks are lined up in front of them and it becomes really hard to complete them altogether. By tracking time properly, you can sense who is taking longer to execute tasks and can identify if they are burdened with overloading of tasks.
Rewarding efficient teammates
If you are tracking the exact time, taken by a certain teammate, to complete a particular series of tasks and if you observe that he or she has met his objectives and performed extra work then it is time to reward that person. This incentive will fuel him or her to do better in the future.
The big picture
For some industries, it is mandatory to measure the working hours of your employees for reporting and compliance purposes. To this end, using a time management software will give you a quantum leap over your competitors.
On top of that, an online based time tracking tool will set you free across the universe since you can access your dashboard anytime with just the internet connectivity from any type of device.
