Why effective employee time tracking is essential for cost management

Editor’s note: TSheets by QuickBooks® has a new name: QuickBooks Time. Find out more about it here.

For business owners, no two days ever look the same. While the business world assures that much of the monotony is removed from your day, making routine and repetitive processes more efficient helps you concentrate on keeping more your revenue – while boosting employee engagement. A key to productivity is focusing on what you do best and leveraging technology to help with accounting, finance, or other daily concerns.

Your duties as an owner or executive might include sales and marketing efforts that have a higher return on investment than spending time overseeing payroll functions, for instance. Yet, ensuring that your workers get paid on-time and correctly is also critically important for employee satisfaction and the success of your company.

With payroll obligations comes tracking the hours of your employees onsite or in the field. Growing businesses can streamline this process through employee time tracking software, which removes multiple steps and potential risks from old-school punching in and out – and transforms data into accurate employee timesheets and paychecks. Furthermore, mobile capabilities allow you to monitor job sites in real-time and monitor staffing levels.

Time tracking software that simply works

Having to import payroll data from a separate app or legacy system to your accounting software can be cumbersome. Your employees may need to spend hours configuring the process manually, entering data from spreadsheets or other documents to reconcile employee paychecks in each specific period.

Whether you process payroll in-house or use an outside vendor, you still might gather time cards and ensure that paychecks are accurate and checks are cut, or direct deposits are made on time. You may have team members who don’t look forward to running payroll because, internally, there’s a lot of manual work involved, or phone calls and emails to payroll vendors just don’t get returned as quickly as you need answers .

With QuickBooks® Enterprise Diamond , your business can take advantage of an end-to-end business management solution to streamline your processes. Bundled with TSheets by QuickBooks Elite time-tracking software, the QuickBooks Enterprise Diamond package has made its core accounting software even more user friendly and effective.

With more productivity comes savings: After California-based Tower Air, Inc., switched from a paper-based system to TSheets by QuickBooks (now known as QuickBooks Time), owner Bob Freeman discovered that about 26 percent of the company’s time was unbillable. Using notebooks that occasionally got lost or misplaced, foreman Jeff Rainbolt had to work back through email and phone records to determine how much time they could actually bill. With TSheets by QuickBooks, the days of chasing paper and past communications came to an end.

Simplifying the time tracking process for employees

With TSheets, having real-time data that flows effortlessly from digital timesheets to your payroll module helps streamline processes for your accounting department and makes employee time management more convenient. From an hourly worker’s perspective, the tools to record hours are at their fingertips when and where they need them, and the reliance on punch cards can be dramatically decreased or eliminated. Managing time sheets in the field is as easy as opening the app and tapping the screen, with automatic alerts sent to remind workers to clock in or out.

With a user-friendly time tracking solution for your employees, accurately recording hours spent on the job can be performed remotely via a mobile device, no matter the location or time of day. With GPS and geofencing, TSheets can remind employees to clock in or out as they’re entering or exiting a worksite, helping to reduce time log errors.

Holding the line on job costs

Since labor costs can be one of the largest components of job costs, accurately measuring the number of hours spent on a project is crucial to identifying which pursuits are profitable and which ones are not. With QuickBooks Enterprise, you can pull up reports of jobs in progress from anywhere to monitor costs and ensure the budgets are on target.

As the job progresses, you can get a feel for those that are running true to estimated costs. QuickBooks Enterprise offers an in-depth view of how much time and cost is left to completion. If you want to gauge the profitability of each job or adjust labor costs as the project is in progress, TSheets and Quickbooks Enterprise sync smoothly to give you the timely data you need to preserve or enhance your bottom line.

For growing businesses that rely on job costing to maximize revenues and control expenses, it’s vital to know where they stand at any point along the job timeline. “If we don’t have visibility into what a job costs, then we have no visibility into what projects we can run,” says Erik Field, director of technical operations, TruEdge Builds. “With QuickBooks, we are able to get a really good picture of where we’re at.”

Clear communication can be a driving force behind any successful project, which is why TSheets features an in-app function where all stakeholders can enter notes through a project activity feed. User permissions can be customized so that only certain individuals can design, publish or change schedules. When shifts are assigned or schedules are modified, each affected employee receives real-time notifications of the update on devices with network access.

QuickBooks Enterprise and TSheets: A dynamic duo

Identifying quantifiable results with time-tracking software allows your business to measure cost savings and gauge the overall positive impact that these applications bring to the table. If you’re apt to calculate ROI or are looking for some firm numbers to help solidify your decision, TSheets has been reported to save users about three hours weekly on average and increase billable time by approximately 11 percent on invoices.

If your goal is to save time and money while keeping your projects on point and your scheduling simplified – among many other benefits – you’ll want to explore the synergies that QuickBooks Enterprise Diamond has to offer.