“Lost time is never found again.” Benjamin Franklin
Timesheets have got a bad reputation – which is why everybody loves to hate them. Project managers don’t want to incorporate online timesheet software and team members hate using it.
Every project, campaign, and task revolves around two main things – time and budget. While you can easily take care of the cost but managing time and meeting deadlines have always been a challenge for people working in any industry.
No matter what you do, time is the most precious commodity in any line of work. Fortunately, with the advent of various timesheet software and other time-tracking apps, managing time is easier than ever. Sadly, many companies are still using the age-old paper-based or Excel method of time-tracking. Here’s why you should move on to the modern method of filling timesheets and tracking time.
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Why You No Longer Need Paper-based Time Tracking?
You might be still using manual time tracking methods to record time spent on each task, bill clients, and to make payrolls. But it is costing your company in ways you couldn’t even imagine now but will definitely regret later.
It could leave you with complicated calculations, inaccuracies, and compliance issues. On top of it, your HR staff is left with a huge administrative burden.
Down here are some common problems you might be facing with paper-based tracking and scheduling.
1. Vague, inflexible, and difficult-to-update
Work schedules could undergo a lot of changes for different reasons such as people taking leaves or calling in sick. Whenever a schedule is made on a paper and things go unplanned, you have to start things all over. Thus, making it difficult-to-update and inflexible to use.
2. Prone to errors and mistakes
There are chances of discrepancies and errors while doing things manually. A mistake could happen either by you or someone on the other side such as your payroll manager. Maybe your four might look like a nine while entering timesheets and it could lead to serious errors that could have large repercussions.
3. Time-consuming
The main thing with manual processing of timesheets is that it consumes way too much of time. Because of which employees tend to let it go or need a push to complete and then hand over their timesheets to be punched into the payroll. It is further double-checked by the payroll staff that further costs them a lot of time yet again. It isn’t just complex and difficult but it also slows down your business.
4. Needs more care, maintenance, and tracking
As per a recent study, nearly half of all hourly workers admit to exaggerating the amount of time they work in each shift. This practice is known as time theft where employees accept pay for the time they have not actually worked. These ten and fifteen minutes here and there could cost companies as much as $400 billion annually along with lost productivity. Using a paper-based system isn’t going to help you much in monitoring or tracking such behavior.
You might be thinking that businesses were being run long before the advent of time tracking and timesheet software. They used to but it would cost them a lot of time and effort. Whereas these software come with a myriad of benefits but we don’t want you to take our word for it. Instead, read the following set of advantages and make your own judgment.
Is wasted time costing your organization big time? Subscribe ProofHub ASAP to prevent all that time worth millions of dollars going down the drain.
What is Timesheet software?
Timesheet software can be used by organizations to track time spent by their employees on tasks, projects, or clients. Timesheet software is used by businesses across various industries for payroll, client billing, estimation, tracking, and even time management.
Timesheet software also provides valuable insights to managers and employees in identifying tasks that are taking more than expected time and costing the most money. This allows users to plan and prioritize tasks accordingly.
Advantages of timesheet software
Any organization, irrespective of its size and type, needs to keep track of the time spent by its employees while at work. Accurate recording of time by using reliable and functional timesheet software can help businesses in more ways than one.
- Automated employee timesheets help businesses (client-based) generate accurate invoices through impartial reports and independent trackers. This will ensure that you don’t end up overcharging or undercharging your clients.
- Using powerful timesheet software makes it easy for clients to check the project’s progress at every stage. This promotes transparency between the business and clients and keeps them both on the same page.
- Using timesheet software helps you identify areas where you’re wasting your organization’s resources. You can take out low-priority tasks that are taking longer than expected time, and save a lot of valuable time in the process.
- Timesheet software can help your company spot the most productive employees in your organization. You can compare the output of different employees, which can help you categorize them as good, average, or mediocre. You can find out which employees deserve recognition and which employees need more training to do the job effectively.
- Automated timesheets help to simplify payroll processing as it records the employees’ actual working hours daily. The HR department can use this accurate data to calculate wages with minimal errors.
- Timesheet software can provide team managers with a clear picture of whether their teams are regularly working beyond their capacity. If this is the case, managers can reduce their workload to help create a fine work-life balance.
- Daily automated timesheets created and maintained through project management software bring all your time data to one central location. Employees can know the amount of time they’re spending on completing different tasks and manage their time accordingly.
- When employees know that automated timesheets are recording the time spent by them on different tasks and projects, they become more conscious and focused on work, which further improves their overall efficiency and productivity.
- It is critical to maintain compliance in any field of work. Failing to do so could leave your company open to various complaints, penalties, and lawsuits. These days many industries need timesheets for reporting and compliance reasons. This could be a pain in the neck if you’re not using cloud-based time-tracking software.
- It’s essential to compare different projects over time to improve the impact of your business. If you’d like to obtain the ratio of different types of projects or see how fast or slow certain types of tasks are being completed, an online time-tracking software could give some answers to them.
So, we’ve read that using good timesheet software can turn out to be hugely beneficial for organizations. Accurate invoicing, payroll, and time tracking of employees are some of the main benefits of using such software. A business that keeps an accurate track of the time of its operations is likely to be more successful than one that doesn’t.
Moving further, we will study how not using a powerful timesheet software can cost businesses big time.
The cost of not using automated timesheet software
Time is money for businesses. If you want to make the most of it, you should know where all the time of your workforce is going during working hours. There’s so much to gain from accurate time data provided through timesheet software.
via GIPHY
On the other hand, not upgrading to automation and continuing to create and rely on manual timesheets can cost businesses heavily as it’s not an accurate and reliable method of time tracking.
Why waste precious time, effort, and space with manual timesheets? Register NOW with ProofHub and digitize all your time data in a centralized location.
Let’s see what businesses stand to lose due to mismanagement of employees’ time.
- Manual processes of timekeeping are time-consuming and lead to the wastage of human resources in the organization
- The risk of human error associated with creating manual timesheets is fairly high
- Fake entries on behalf of another employee are a common issue
- Manual timesheets take up a lot of space and are prone to damage, theft, and misplacement
- Manual timesheets are not as accurate as automated timesheets, which can create many problems when making payroll or generating invoices
- Low scalability and lack of integration with other systems
Features of powerful timesheet software
Without a doubt, there are many options available when it comes to the availability of timesheet software today. Every timesheet software is trying to get the customer’s attention by promoting itself as the best in the market.
However, if you are choosing a timesheet software just because it is the best in the market then you might be making the wrong choice. Like every timesheet software is different, with each offering a different set of features to its users, the same applies to organizations too.
Every business is different. Your organization’s time-tracking requirements are likely to be different from others. For example, a field management service business might have different time-tracking needs as compared to a shoe manufacturing company. While the former has to record time data of its on-field employees, the latter has to create timesheets for its on-premises employees.
That said, there are some features that no business, irrespective of its type, can afford to miss out on when choosing the best timesheet software. Do you want to know what are some must-have features that you should look for in a timesheet software?
Read on, we’ve created a list of essential features for you so that you can make a well-informed decision.
1. Real-time monitoring
This is the main feature to look out for when you’ve got a small or big team to supervise. Real-time monitoring enables you to track what your employees are doing whenever you want to. This will give them a clear idea of whether or not their team members are efficiently utilizing available time or wasting a valuable resource called “time”.
Employees leaving their work midway and indulging in time-wasting activities is a major problem faced by many companies. Real-time monitoring allows managers to check what’s going on on their employees’ screens. While this may appear like you’re spying on your employees, the fact is your employees are aware that their work can be tracked at any time.
It’s only when employees will browse non-work-related websites that they are likely to feel insecure or anxious about their actions.
2. Time reports
Another essential feature that is offered by good teamsheet software. And if the software doesn’t offer this feature then it doesn’t even deserve your second look. Team managers can create custom time reports of people and projects, and see how much time is being spent by people on different tasks and projects.
When it comes to creating time reports for clients, managers can see the total number of billed hours, billable hours, and non-billable hours.
3. Timesheets
This feature is the crux of any timesheet software. While nearly all will offer this feature, its functionality, and versatility will vary from tool to tool. When looking for powerful timesheet software, do check out all things that you can do in that particular software timesheet. Generally, a good timesheet solution inbuilt into a top project management software like ProofHub will allow you to:
- Add multiple timesheets to record time data
- Use timesheets for payroll, client billing, estimation, and time management
- Set time estimates for different tasks
- Track time manually or using timers
- Export and archive timesheets
- See all time data in a single place
- Limit visibility of timesheets to selected people
4. Works smoothly on all platforms
As a team manager, you’re supposed to access your timesheet software only from your office, on your PC, or laptop. When you want to monitor your employees in real time, you should be able to do it on the go or from your home. The optimized timesheet solution works hassle-free across multiple devices, like PC, laptops, iPad, and mobile phones.
People prefer to work on different devices. Some like to work on PCs, some on laptops, and others on tablets. A good timesheet software solution works equally well on all devices and operating systems including iOS, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
5. Affordable
Covid-19 has hit a large number of businesses across the globe. Many businesses have shut down their operations and many are struggling to survive. In these unpredictable times, it helps to choose affordable timesheet software, especially for startups and small-scale teams.
You wouldn’t like to invest in a timesheet solution with “per-user” pricing plans. As your team grows, such software can prove to be incredibly expensive on your organization’s budget. Choosing a solution with fixed pricing plans means you only have to pay once monthly or yearly and continue without worrying about increasing costs.
6. Integration capabilities
Would you like to use a timesheet software that can only be used independently, without integrating with other apps of your choice so you can manage other aspects from a single location? I doubt so. Some software APIs can be integrated with the existing project management software, which is of great use when you’re already using team collaboration and project management software.
Also, you should be able to export timesheets and all the time data to other systems, which makes integration with other business apps easy.
7. Technical support
Imagine you have experienced a technical glitch in your timesheet software at odd hours of the day, and the technical support for your timesheet software is not available. I know you would not want to be left feeling frustrated and helpless in such a desperate situation.
So, make sure that the timesheet software you choose offers round-the-clock technical support through phone, chat, or email. This will make sure that your timesheet software is back on track as soon as possible in case there is some sort of technician snags.
How to Choose the Right Timesheet Software
Every software isn’t designed equally. Some can do this, not that while others can do that but not this. While choosing a time-tracking tool for your business, choose the one that adapts as per the needs and requirements of your business, not the other way around.
Along with this, your timesheet software should have the following things:
- Advanced time-tracking capabilities
- Real-time monitoring
- Easy submission of timesheets
- Quick reporting
- Email notifications
Why ProofHub is the ideal timesheet software for your business?
ProofHub is an all-in-one team collaboration and project management tool with many powerful features to simplify complex project management. Timesheets are one of its useful features that are specifically designed to help organizations improve efficiency, increase productivity, and significantly reduce time wastage.
Easy to use and easy to understand, ProofHub’s time-tracking software gives team managers and their teams a clear picture of how much time they are spending on tasks and projects.
With all-time data at a centralized location, team managers can identify areas where unnecessary time is being spent by employees. Similarly, team managers can also analyze the time data accumulated by the timesheet software to figure out the average time spent on completing certain tasks.
In other words, team managers can assign tasks according to the time taken by team members to complete them. This will ensure that team members are not assigned excessive work that they find difficult to handle.
Let us take a look at some stand-out features of ProofHub’s time-tracking software, which will give us useful insight into the amazing capabilities of this software.
- Add multiple timesheets to record time data. Use them for payroll, client billing, estimation, tracking, and even time management.
- Set time estimates to set a clear timeframe for tasks and projects, so team members can set the pace of their work accordingly.
- Know which tasks take more than the estimated time.
- Have a Bird’s eye view of all time data of people across all projects, billable or non-billable, project progress, and status, without having to jump through projects.
- You can track time manually or use timers to record the time it takes to get work done.
- You can export timesheets and use them for client invoicing, payroll, estimation, and even time management.
- Archive timesheets from the Time section and use them later whenever required.
- Create custom time reports of people and projects. Get to see logged hours pulled right from your timesheets, all in a one-time tracking tool
- You can limit the visibility of timesheets only to a selected few people with whom you want to share them. You can give access to more people or reduce them whenever you want.
- Advanced search allows you to find what you’re looking for in timesheets using relevant keywords and phrases.
Fed up tedious manual processes to record time spent on tasks by employees? Embrace ProofHub NOW and automate the whole time tracking process to save time, money, and efforts.
The final thought
It goes without saying that accurate time tracking has become an integral part of any organization’s time management procedure. You cannot assume your employees are making the right use of available time just because they are present at work. You ought to know how much time they are spending on what activities.
Using top-rated timesheet software can help your organization save precious time, money, and resources. You will know exactly how much time your employees are spending, on what activities. Detailed time data will allow team managers to filter out low-priority tasks while understanding the individual capacity of every team member.
So, what are you waiting for? ProofHub offers one of the most efficient and affordable timesheet software you can have for your team. Go, get it and track time the way it should be in the 21st century!
