The Four Pillars of Perfect Time Tracking and How You Can Profit From Them

Tracking Working Hours 

Of course, time-tracking tools can only earn their name by mastering the basics: monitoring working hours. 

Still, allowing the users to add 8 hours a day to the system is not enough to provide the managers with a complete overview of work. To monitor assignments and their impact on projects and the company as a whole, they also need: 

• The costs of every tracked hour based on employee’s rates or contract requirements, 
• Progress monitoring allowing them to see any deviations from the initial plans,
• An overview of time offs and public holidays that could affect the total amount of working hours. 

Only with such a set of features, managers can monitor projects efficiently, ensure accurate billing, and make their plans for the future more and more accurate with every new set of data. 

Invoicing Based On Tracked Time

Time is money, and in the professional services industry, this saying is becoming increasingly true. Time-tracking tools should reflect that. 

To do so successfully, they should include: 

• Invoice calculators can convert tracked hours into costs a customer needs to cover. 
• Invoice approval workflows allowing the managers to verify the financial statements. 
• Automated workflows for invoicing and payments with notifications and schedules to prevent errors and ensure transparency. 

Such a connection between tracked time and invoicing is not only a true time saver but also a guarantee of the accuracy of each financial document delivered to the customer. 

Productivity Management

While an invoice might be the final step in a customer’s journey, the journey of time tracking data is much longer. After the bills are settled, worklogs can be used to improve people’s productivity and, as a result, companies' profits. 

One might say, “Easier said than done”. Still, saying and doing might be equally easy, provided your time-tracking tool can help you compare plans and allocations to the tracked hours spent on a given task. 

Using this feature, managers can quickly verify whether their estimates are accurate and check which employees are the most productive on various assignments. In the future, they can make use of that information to assign the most efficient people to different types of projects, improving their performance and, consequently, the delivery rates. 

Measuring Utilization and Profitability

Lastly, meticulously filled timesheets can be converted into another important piece of information: utilization and, consequently, profitability. 

By monitoring the tracked hours, managers can see which employees are overutilized and which are enjoying their seventh cup of coffee while waiting for new assignments. Then, they can use the information to find new projects for idle specialists or make necessary team changes. 

The result? Improved profitability and dropping costs. 

Learn To Track Time From The Best

Of course, you do not have to check for every one of those features on your own to ensure you have everything a perfect professional services company needs to master time tracking. 

Instead, you can just book a demo for one of the BigTime solutions and see how all of our modules can power up your time tracking and, as a result, the entire company. 

Perfect time tracking is just a single click away!