5 Easy but Impactful Time Tracking Tips

This article delivers tips to help company owners adopt simple digital timekeeping practices to enhance their business. From saving money and staying compliant with the law to maintaining relationships, these easy-to-follow tips will add value to your day-to-day processes.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your organisation is. Nor if you work with external contractors or have employees. Office-bound, hybrid or remote - every setting is equal. Time tracking is crucial for any business. It helps ensure the workers are paid on time and per their rates. Not to mention, it contributes to improvements in various operations across the organisation such as billing, project management and many more.

A good time-tracking practice will provide you with valuable insights into your overall productivity. From better visibility of project progress to assessment of advancement towards business goals, time management is the foundation of your success.

What is the Most Efficient Way to Track Time?

The most effective time to track time is using timesheets. Writing down the exact hours each employee worked is crucial when calculating their compensation. However, there are different types of timesheets. Traditional paper ones, digital timesheets, desktop time trackers… The list goes on.

Some would argue that different approaches work better for some businesses than they do for others. We disagree. The is one specific type of timesheets we believe is superior when it comes to efficiency, no matter the size or industry of the organisation.

1. Adopt Software to Keep Track of Employee Hours

Accuracy is everything when it comes to payroll. There’s no place for mistakes as the consequences can be very severe. From damaged relationships to legal issues, you simply can’t afford it. The best way to avoid human error is to exclude humans from the process and trust business intelligence instead.

Get a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution that can easily and accurately track your employee’s hours. Putting your staff on a time management system improves transparency and takes the risk of miscalculations, especially when handling more complicated procedures such as overtime payments. Timesheet Portal Project also allows you to simplify processes such as flexitime management and holiday request approval.

2. Be Strict About Employee Break Time

Despite work breaks being mandatory and paid, many employees choose to skip them. Whether this is done due to sincere dedication or in an attempt to impress you, you must not allow this. During the mandated break time, the employees are to relieve themselves from work-related duties. If they don’t, the employer is legally obliged to pay them for that time.

Other than that, working with no breaks is the quickest path to burnout. It can manifest in a decline in productivity and lack of effort. It also increases the chance of mistakes. You’re meant to enforce mandatory break time on your staff due to legal compliance concerns, but you are also supposed to do that for their mental well-being.

3. Keep Employee Records Up to Date

Implementation of a time tracking system is just the beginning of the process. You must also make sure the timesheets are filled up correctly and stored at a safe, centralised location. If the need to verify your payroll arises, you want to have easy access to these records.

A wise solution here would be to adopt a timesheet software that has a centralised document management system within. This way the timesheets are automatically saved in a designated location. Our solution is also designed to store important information about the employees, such as employment contracts, passport copies and other documents collected during onboarding.

4. Spot and Eliminate Time Theft 

Whether it’s accidental or not, time theft happens a lot. Especially without an employee time tracking system in place. A recent study has discovered that 75% of businesses fall victim to this malpractice and lose enormous amounts of money annually. Time theft has many forms. From an employee forgetting to clock out to one worker covering the other by clocking in for them - also known as buddy punching.

The solution and therefore a defence against losing money is an investment in online time tracking software. The best solutions on the market are available across different devices and some even have GPS to confirm the location of a clock-in. As the majority of these systems have unique logins for each employee, clocking in for another person becomes difficult to do. This in turn allows you to stay safe from malpractice.

5. Automate Billable Time Management

Alongside employee payroll time tracking, you’re also responsible for making sure billable time is tracked too. The employees that work on the projects should track the time spent not only on projects worked but on specific tasks as well. Occasionally, different tasks will have different cost-per-hour which emphasises the need to record them separately. Our software has been designed with that in mind. In Timesheet Portal, you can easily build custom timesheets that are inclusive of your unique agreement.

Additionally, transparency on time spent and tasks worked builds stronger, trust-driven relationships with your clients. Correct invoices position you as a responsible and professional supplier, contributing to long-term partnerships and client retention. The inability to provide perfect timestamps when issuing invoices can damage your credibility and mistakes might even lead to legal issues.

To avoid mistakes, our software generates and sends invoices based on your timesheet, taking away the need for manual keying and reducing the chance of human error. In other words, we are focused on the automation of billable time management to support the smoothest communication between you and your clients.

Summary

The practices described above are simple to implement and are easily integrated into day-to-day processes. However, their impact on the overall performance of your business is tremendous. Being responsible with timekeeping creates better rapport with your employees, aligns the teams and helps with client retention.

In our age of technology, following most of these tips requires little human involvement. The software that is available on the market, including ours, has been specifically created to provide assistance on smoother workflows that also support compliance and quicker execution.

Are you itching to better your internal processes? Book a demo and we’ll guide you through it.