To track or not to track. It’s not even a question to business owners anymore because most employers have already bid farewell to traditional methods of time tracking. Time tracking tools can be classified as either a desktop, web, or mobile app software. This software tracks the time, workforce, and resources spent on one or multiple tasks by an employee or a group of employees.

The benefits of time tracking software for a business are immense. Implementing software that automatically tracks employee hours and project responsibilities can improve its management and organization.

Here are the five major time tracking problems that software can help small businesses solve.

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1. Shift Scheduling Complexities

For small business owners, shift scheduling can be tiresome and time-consuming while juggling other demanding areas of your new-born business. Creating employee shift schedules can be a slow process where you can spend up to 8 hours a week making these schedules.

Employee shift scheduling is not just limited to creating schedules but also updating those schedules; a task which progressively becomes cumbersome when your workforce grows.

A 2020 survey conducted by Intermedia showed that 57% of small business owners are more likely to continue remote working options for employees in the long term with employee availability increasing by 19% by shifting to remote work. With remote work trends becoming more common for small businesses, time tracking systems provide you with 24/7 accessibility to employee schedules, limiting the confusion and miscommunication by telephone that remote work could cause.

With a centralized system, there are no more back and forth emails once you publish the schedule. Moreover, employees cannot claim that they were not notified about shift changes. Hence, such systems can solve this time tracking problem, limiting scheduling complexities.

2. Payroll Issues

Besides shift scheduling, calculating weekly wages manually can be a hassle for small business owners. A small percent of businesses still track time for their employees through paper time cards and timesheet templates – a potentially harmful manual process to efficiency and employee payroll. With a time tracking system, working hours are correctly logged.

Through seamless integration with payroll providers, time tracking systems automatically record logged-in hours of employees and provide an overview of which tasks employees are spending their work hours on. The automation of tracking systems eradicates any manual input dependency, thus eliminating the chance of misreporting working hours.

Additionally, automated tracking systems inform business owners about their employees’ actual time on specific tasks – ensuring projects to be correctly accounted for and billed. Through automatic time tracking, business owners are successfully able to keep track of work hours, pay their employees for what they work and avoid payroll issues all at the same time.

3. Project Mismanagement

Business owners can often find several projects and milestones regularly overlapping. This can be a significant issue that directly affects relationships with clients. Such situations require a review of project timeframes where business owners can identify if they are being overambitious with their projected schedules and deadlines. This is known as project management.

With a time-tracking set in place, you can accurately tell how many hours each individual task takes. Over a certain period, business owners are also able to identify patterns that consistently repeat for certain project types or at specific stages of a project. Identified patterns through a tracking system allow business owners to adjust schedules to a more realistic timeframe. This is a successful project management process at work.

A project time tracking software provides businesses with a line of sight for future projects where owners can better prioritize tasks and optimize their team capacity. On top of this, project time tracking records every second spent on individual tasks. As a result, detailed logging can add up, providing your business with more billable time to customer invoices and overall improvement of project management.

4. Under or Overestimating Project Costing

Project time tracking provides businesses with accurate data about the time, workforce and assets that a specific project will require. One of the most beneficial traits of a tracking system is that it then allows businesses to report on those recorded data to improve future prioritization.

With access to a huge pool of resources about staff, suppliers, jobs and profits, business owners can easily focus their desired strategy and measure their progress through benchmarking. Given a better understanding of projects’ actual costs, time tracking allows businesses to bill clients accurately. The better the cost estimates, the more money a business can generate.

In some cases, businesses are faced with situations where they find themselves charging clients less or more than what they are supposed to. Such a mistake ends up exceeding the first cost estimates proposed to their clients – which can be highly inconvenient and uncomfortable to deal with. With the help of a time tracking system, businesses can easily generate reports from their stored pool of data to present to clients and point out the roots of the additional costs.

Moreover, a time tracking system gives businesses the necessary tools to create nearly precise estimates for future projects, saving money and their credibility in front of clients. Time and project trackers provide the perfect solution for such time tracking problems.

5. Managing and Tracking Remote and Mobile Workers

The concept of time tracking came into existence to provide remote teams with structure, visibility, and transparency. While time tracking allows managers to coordinate resources, it also offers remote workers the chance to monitor their performance. Time tracking tools for remote workers record the working hours of out-of-office employees automatically and help workers focus on what they have been hired to do.

Similarly, business owners can often see their employees either unsure about their action plan or simply lacking a sense of urgency around their deadlines. With GPS tracking within the workforce, business owners enable their team to be accountable for each second of their work.

Implementing GPS time tracking businesses reduces instances where employees clock in for each other or exaggerate their work hours. You can track your employees’ locations and their hours throughout the day and thus boost employee accountability. With GPS time tracking, remote employees are aware that they are paid accurately and fairly. This helps employees feel more engaged at work and boosts their productivity.

Start Tracking Today

Time tracking is a vital tool that will boost your business. Being able to provide a timesheet record of every function of your business to your prospective clients can be extremely valuable for them, and for you. It demonstrates your professionalism with the precision of what output to expect from your company.

QuickBooks Time offers businesses and employees an easy way to keep track of work hours to decrease payroll issues and increase accuracy and productivity with time trackers. Why not try it free today? Sign up and experience how QuickBooks Time transforms your employee time tracking systems, and ultimately your business, for the better.

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