The topic we will cover in this article is the positive impact of digital timesheets on your financial operations. We will highlight both, instant wins and continuous benefits you can gain from digitising time tracking.
We often talk about digital timesheets as a tool that will help you deliver projects more efficiently and accurately. However, a topic that isn’t touched upon often is how the same software can help you enhance your internal processes too. Despite its limiting name, digital timesheet tools cover more ground than simply time tracking. They come with a variety of automation features that can help you perform better when delivering client work as well as improve your team’s efficiency.
In light of that, today’s topic is all about how a timesheet solution affects your internal processes and where it can be applied to make them run smoother, faster and more accurate. Specifically, we will be talking about financial processes as digital timesheets are closely related to billing procedures.
What Are the Benefits of Timesheet Automation?
There are multiple reasons why you should consider timesheet automation. Here are some of the benefits it offers:
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Saves time;
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Reduces costs;
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Helps with staying compliant;
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Reduces admin work;
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Speeds the processes up;
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Collects data as you use the tool;
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Highlights potential gaps in your processes;
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Improves accuracy;
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Takes over menial tasks that tend to stack up.
Naturally, there are more items to be added to this list, but these would be the key ones. The following sections of the article will discuss them in greater detail.
Boost to Speed and Efficiency
The first part to touch upon would be the impact digital sheets can bring to your financial process flow. Through introducing automation, time tracking tools excel in speeding up your operations without sacrificing the quality. Sounds too good to be true? Let’s dig deeper to understand how it works.
Significant Reduction of Admin Work
The first and most important benefit of digitising processes is minimising administrative work. Admin tasks are notorious for being tedious, repetitive, time-consuming and yet vital. Especially when it comes to financial processes such as processing invoices and calculating timesheets to deduce how much to pay your workers. Digital timesheets can take the majority of these tasks off your hands.
All time-related information that’s recorded by the software is pulled whenever you run processes like billing or invoicing. Depending on the software, you will have control over the setup of what exactly is being registered and when. For example, setting up time rules for differentiating rates. Most of timesheet solutions are also integrated with popular accounting packages, meaning the two exchange data automatically, without you having to manually import/export it.
Quicker Turn-Around Time
Automating financial processes via timesheet use also means running them quicker. Even the most experienced employee would spend up to an hour running a single operation manually, whereas designated software solves it in a matter of minutes. What’s more, despite taking less time to run the operations, it does not sacrifice the quality. If anything, automation reduces the risk of human error by nearly 100%.
Speeding up stand-alone processes can kickstart a chain reaction across your entire business. By improving the turn-around time of, for example, invoicing, you will naturally improve the cash flow. Not to mention, as things get processed faster from financial and legal standpoints, the company will become available to take on more projects at shorter time frames, which is again bound to grow revenue. Business transforming changes don’t have to be huge. Sometimes little touch-ups like automating day-to-day processes can give a boost you would have never expected.
Continuous Improvements
The biggest mistake to be made is to think that once you’ve peaked once you achieve that efficiency bump. When you use timesheets, you collect data continuously and it can be applied again and again for further optimisation and development.
Easily Acquired Accuracy
We’ve already mentioned the reduction of human error when automating processes, but this is not where it ends. When the tool is set up correctly, the data it pulls is accurate at all times, something that is very important to businesses, especially from a financial standpoint. And the fun part is that the metrics you track are practically a mix and match based on your needs. Using digital timesheets unlocks data you would otherwise have no access to.
The more you use the tool, the more data you will be collecting. In fact, when you optimise your processes based on your findings, the accuracy of future information increases too. Accurate metrics are greatly beneficial in many areas of the business. They should be at the foundation of every decision you make, plus they serve purposes such as forecasting and resource distribution. There is no such thing as complete accuracy, but when you use digital timesheets, in the long run you are likely to get very close to that.
Closer Look at the Processes
Apart from collecting data related to revenue, digital timesheets can also help you discover gaps in your processes, both internally and externally. For example, by having a centralised look at timesheet approvals and billing, you may notice a pattern there is a certain point at which the process slows down. This gives you a perfect opportunity to dig further into the problem and solve it, whereas normally you wouldn’t notice it.
We’ve already spoken about optimisation, but it is crucial and we therefore want to emphasise it again. Many findings that emerge from using digital timesheets specifically can help you optimise your financial processes and then continue collecting data for further analysis moving forward. The biggest benefit of that is that this approach guarantees constant improvement as different data will bring on a new set of changes. And these, in turn, will bring on new data. In other words, digital timesheets allow polishing your processes continuously.
Help with Internal Hindrances
There are many small, inconvenient issues in every company that stem from within. While most of them are directly related to the people you work with, the right tools can help you navigate these situations too.
Cut the Chase
It can be extremely frustrating to invest a lot of time and effort in improving processes and their efficiency just to have it negatively affected by… People. And it happens, a lot. Whether it’s the workers not submitting their timesheets or the approvers not fulfilling their reviews on time, chasing after people is a massive waste of time. Believe it or not, digital timesheets can help you address this issue too.
First of all, digital timesheets offer more accessibility, meaning your staff can fill them from literally anywhere as long as they have internet access. For example, during commuting. Some apps will send them notifications when that hasn’t been done within a certain time frame past their shift end. It is similar when talking about the approvers. At Timesheet Portal specifically, you can send automated text messages that will chase the approvers for you if they haven’t done their bit within an allocated time. The feature can also be set as a reminder system, notifying the approvers they are running out of time before they do.
Summary
Digital timesheets are a very versatile tool. Not only do they expedite and improve your client work, but also contribute to your internal operations. They are great for bettering the flow of financial processes specifically through enabling the automation of various tasks, this way reducing the amount of manual admin work. Understandably, that saves your team a lot of time and grants a quicker turn-around time when it comes to cash flow-related things like invoicing or client billing.
The more you use digital timesheets, the more data you will collect and the more accurate it will be. It is crucial when making decisions. Data collected through timesheets can expose gaps in your internal processes, providing an opportunity to improve. Once you make changes based on the metrics, you will have a new batch to analyse and optimise based on. Finally, some digital time tracking solutions can help you solve some deep-seated inconveniences such as taking over the task of chasing people over not completing their tasks on time.
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