We are dedicating this article to Managing Directors and Executive Managers with the purpose of helping them adopt simple igital timekeeping practices that will enhance their business. From saving money and staying compliant with the law to maintaining relationships with both clients and employees, 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, whether you work with external contractors or have employees, nor whether you have a physical office or run the business remotely. Time tracking is crucial for any business as this is a system that ensures every contributing party is paid for the job: on time and accurately.
While payroll accuracy and transparency are important factors that keep you compliant with labour laws, the benefit of responsibly handled time tracking doesn’t end here. It’s an important client billing tool as well as a provider of valuable insights into your overall productivity. From better visibility of project progress to the assessment of advancement towards business goals, time management is the foundation of your success.
5 Quick Time Tracking Tips to Adopt Today
Now let’s cover how to get your time management on track right away.
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 with your staff to legal issues, you simply can’t afford it. The best way of avoiding human error is to exclude the human 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 payment. Timesheet Portal Project solution also gives you access to simplifying 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 on skipping them. Whether this is done due to sincere dedication or in attempt to impress you - you must not allow this to happen. During break time, the employees are to relieve themselves from work-related duties. If they don’t, the employer is legally obliged of paying 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, as well as an increased chance of mistakes. In other words, as much as you’re meant to enforce mandatory break time on your staff due to legal compliance concerns, you are also supposed to do that for their mental wellbeing.
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 of verifying 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 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 and managed correctly too. The employees that work on the projects should track the time spent not on just projects worked but specific tasks as well. Occasionally, different tasks will have different cost-per-hour to them, which puts emphasis on the need to record them separately. Our software has been designed with that in mind, and therefore 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, therefore contributing to long-term partnerships and client retention. Inability to provide perfect timestamps when providing invoices can damage your credibility and mistakes might even lead to legal issues.
To avoid mistakes as much as possible, our software generates and sends invoices based on your timesheet, taking away the element of manual keying and therefore 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.
