Time Tracking 101: Time is Money
To Begin…
I’m sure you’ve heard it before that
time is money
Well, this is especially relevant when working in professional services (e.g., lawyers, developers, freelancers, engineers, etc). Not only do you need to know your hours — you need to bill them. Otherwise you don’t get paid.
Unfortunately, this means you have to remember how much time you spent working on specific projects for a multitude of clients. This becomes especially hard if you’re calculating your hours at the end of the week and manually adding them into a spreadsheet for a client.
A recent study from AffinityLive, a company that specialises in professional services automation, surveyed 500 workers last summer. The firm calculated that each person lost $50,000 per year in revenue due to insufficient tracking of emails with clients and others. In total, “almost 40% of respondents reported never tracking time spent reading and answering email,” with only 33% of respondents saying they “always” or “often” do. Consider these numbers when you realise that “more than half of survey respondents indicated that their employer directly uses time sheets to bill clients hourly or determine retainer amounts.”
Taking into account the size of the professional services sector, the company estimates that the U.S. economy is losing 50 million hours, or $7.4 billion a day, in productivity — Harvard Business Review, Gretchen Gavett.
Why won’t people track time if they are loosing that much money in billable hours?
The answer is convenience.
The task of tracking your time is often thought to be a process that is cumbersome and complicated. In which, it’s just assumed that the effort taken to calculate your hours using software is not worth the payout. Yet, there are a variety of time tracking platforms that can easily calculate billable hours for you, create invoices, send reminders and much more. Not only making your life easier but increasing your profitability and efficiency.
In the End…
The solution? Track your time, with Hourly. It is going to make your life that much easier. No need to worry about software that doesn’t integrate into your daily workflow. Hourly will bring everything you need into one easy to use platform. Making the task of tracking time simple and intuitive.
If you think it’s for you, why not check out Hourly? It’s free for 30 days!
