Time tracking software is the need of the hour in today’s fast-paced world. Presently, everyone wants to be more efficient and seek better results. When time has become the most essential resource, businesses need innovative ways to use this crucial resource judiciously and get maximum results from the minimum expenditure.
Time tracking tools are one such innovative tool that businesses are using to promote time management and time tracking. Before deploying time tracking tools, people have numerous concerns. The major concerns are what these tools actually do, how they work, are they really effective.
In this blog, we have answered all such questions and have tried to help readers understand time tracking software in depth.
Understanding Time Tracking Software
The tools that employers use for recording the working hours of employees calculating their billing, payroll, and operations are referred to as employee time tracking software. These tools measure each employee’s time spent on different assigned tasks, generating automatic payroll and invoices for clients.
These software record where their employees are spending maximum time, what part of projects is most time-consuming, know the actual project status and calculate the overall efficiency of employees.
The main components of a time tracking tool are a time entry tool, timesheet approval feature, payroll processing, and report generation.
Advantages of Time Tracking Software for Salaried and Hourly Employees
The prominent advantages of time tracking software are:
Tracking Labor and Billing Costs
Timesheets in time tracking help organizations in gathering information about billable hours which are essential to generate invoices for the clients. Having software for calculating the billable hours reduces difficulties and errors in billing. Also, disputes with clients are minimized as you have facts and figures to showcase to the clients.
Other than generating invoices for clients, time tracking software also helps employers to collect data to calculate monthly salaries for employees working on an hourly basis. These tools show how much time is spent by every employee on different tasks and calculate their monthly payments by multiplying the hours spent by their hourly rates.
Tracking Overtime and Absenteeism
Timesheets help employers to track how much time their employees are spending in offices. Calculating every employee’s overtime manually is tedious. With time tracking tools, noting down who is working overtime and how long is easy. This helps in generating accurate payroll. Also, these tools help in identifying employees spending fewer hours at the workplace.
Monitoring Leave Balancing
Software like employee monitoring and time tracking also enables employers to monitor their employees’ leave balance accurately. Such tools have features that record allotted leaves for every employee. When employees take leave or new monthly leave is added to their records, it will automatically be stored in tracking devices. Hence, it eliminates the need to record leave balances manually.
Promoting Accountability
When every activity of employees is under the surveillance of a monitoring tool, no one can escape after committing blunders. Such software helps to know who is doing what so whenever anything unwanted occurs, you can easily know who is responsible for them. Also, innocent people do not owe any accountability to such action and they have facts and figures to prove their innocence.
Delivering Superior Project Management
When organizations have tracking tools and productivity monitoring software, they can easily know who is performing what and what is the actual status of any project. This helps business owners to replan things if something is lagging is project delivery. Hence, they can deliver quality projects without missing deadlines.
Boosting Productivity
Time tracking software is not only helpful in better time management but is also helpful in improving productivity at the workplace. It is as simple as that, when you have strategies coupled with time management, your productivity will surely be enhanced.
Gathering Information for Employee Appraisals
These tools with actual data on employees’ real-time performance are the most effective tools for preparing appraisal and promotion reports. Employers now have proofs for accurate performance measuring so no office politics is needed and the deserving candidates can be promoted.
Best Practices for Using Time Tracking Software
For the best results, best practices are essential. Similarly, to get maximum benefits employers should find the best ways to deploy time tracking tools. Some of the important best practices are:
Show Value of Time Tracking to Employees
When employees know the value of time tracking and its benefits, they will be more welcoming to such tool deployments. Proper training and demo sessions for employees on time tracking software will help them learn about the different features of these tools. This will help them to get the maximum benefits from these tools and will face the least difficulties in using them.
Set Objectives for Time Tracking
Once you decide to introduce a time tracking software for your employees, the next step is to clearly understand the goals and objectives that you want to achieve with these tools. Monitoring and tracking software provides useful insights into an employee’s productivity level, engagement, and overall productivity over different projects. This helps employers to make informed decisions and schedule the daily activities of their employees effectively.
Organizations can also better understand their employees’ time utilization, detect inefficiencies, and find opportunities for their improvement. Time tracking also clarifies if any project is profitable or not as they provide real-time insights.
Determine the Amount of Tracking
Before introducing tools to track employee time management in your organizations, it is important to determine how much tracking you need. Make a plan as to which activities to track, how much to track, and similar other questions. Also, the employers must decide in advance the ways to track mid-breaks, lunch timings, etc.
Explain Team the Ease of Time Tracking
It is essential that your team knows how simple the process of using time tracking and employee monitoring software is. Also, employers should explain to them how easy these tools will make their daily work.
Final Thoughts
Time management being a crucial component in businesses requires innovative tools and updated software for better results. But before actually implementing them, employers must know the effective ways to use them, decide the goals and objectives of using them, and train employees to use such software. The ones who take care of all such concerns are expected to get the best results from deploying time tracking tools.
