Time Tracking 101: Why Track Time?
Have you ever asked yourself the question
‘where has all the time gone?’
Tldr;
- Five reasons to start tracking time
- Unpacking the idea of time tracking
- The only guide you’ll ever need to understand why tracking your time is essential for the success and growth of your business
To Begin…
Have you ever left work feeling like a tonne of bricks has hit you? You stared at your screen all day. You’re fatigued, confused, and faded. You take a minute to think about all you’ve accomplished. And. Blank.
You know you worked hard today, but you just can’t remember the specifics.
You know what could help you remember. Yes, that’s right. Time tracking. Still not convinced — well let me break it down for you. Here’s five key reasons why you should track your time.
Profitability
Maximise billable hours: you might think that everything you’re doing is going towards billable hours, but little did you know that there is a whole lot of non-billable hours in your life. It’s easy to forget about all those little non-billable hours but they sure do add-up.
But what are non-billable hours? Well, they are everything we don’t charge the client for. That’s emails, internal projects, invoices, new business ideas, proposals, client research, networking, entertaining clients, administrative work, employee development and training, meetings, and the list goes on and on.
See billable and non-billable time: time tracking shows you the billable and non-billable hours of your clients, projects and people. If you’ve got a great tool (i.e., Hourly) you’ll be able to see which clients are costing you the most, what your team is working on and which projects should become a priority.
Understand budgets: if you’re not a maths person then you probably hate budgeting. But great time tracking tools make understanding budgets just that little bit easier. Not only will you have a visual representation, but you will be able to historically view when you went over or under budget. Which will help you predict and estimate future clients better (but we will get to that later).
Billing clients: time tracking is essential to knowing know how much to charge your clients. Even if you aren’t tracking by the hour, time tracking can help you understand how long it took you to complete a project. Some tools even create the invoices for you, making invoicing and billing painless.
Boost Productivity and Efficiency
Improve how you work: Improve? With a simple tool? Yes. You’re reading that right, a simple tool could save you hours and hours whilst boosting efficiency. How? Well, can you answer a few simple questions for me?
How often do you attend meetings? How long does emailing take up during your day? Are internal processes stopping you from moving forward? How long does client research take?
Without having data in front of you it’s quite hard to answer these simple questions. Yet, with time tracking, you could answer in a heartbeat. Tracking your time often uncovers inefficiencies in the way you do things. This new insight helps you to understand how you could improve your day, week and even year to save time and money.
Forecasting and Bench-marking
Improve pricing estimates: it’s hard to know how to price things. Basically, you’re just guessing until you get your hands on it. Time tracking helps you overcome this problem through inspecting historical data and analysing it to understand how long previous projects took you. You’ll be able to further compare and benchmark if you lost money on these projects and whether you need to increase the budgets for future projects. The more you track. The more accurate your estimates are.
But why? Well, you have a tracking library where you can view past projects, giving you better estimates on prices and timelines.
Clients hate when promises are broken, often this negatively impacts the client-relationship. If you can deliver on your promise through establishing realistic expectations that don’t change, you will remain on top.
Record Keeping
A record of you work: time tracking allows you to keep a solid record of everything that was completed for a project. Clients may want to know who, what, where, when and why.
With time tracking you won’t even need to blink before you can answer. Why? You’ll have a record. With the right time tracking tool (e.g., Hourly) all you will need to do is just generate a simple report. All the details are there.
This can be super handy if it does come to a dispute between you and your client. There’s no second guessing. This is even more beneficial for individuals who work in areas that may be audited. Time tracking is a record of everything you’ve ever done.
Team Management
Manage your team: are your employees over or under working? Tracking time leads to happier, healthier and more motivated team members who can strike that fine line of a healthy work-life balance. Time tracking allows your team to really understand where their time is going. Often, they might not even think about it but seeing visually how much you have done makes you feel accomplished.
See hidden costs: businesses are constantly struggling to stay on top of the costs of labour. Salaries, benefits and healthcare doubles the cost of labour. By tracking employee time businesses are able to better understand how much their employees are really costing them before even considering hiring more help.
In the end…
There are so many reasons why you should be tracking your time. But often, businesses don’t start looking for a solution for tracking time until it’s needed.
The irony of it is that they aren’t just solving one simple problem but creating opportunities for their businesses to be more profitable, sustainable, productive, and efficient.
Is it going to be hard to track my time? Fortunately, it’s easy nowadays to track time. It’s just a simple click of a timer, and you’re on your way to making smarter, better decisions. If you think it’s for you, why not check out Hourly? It’s free for 30 days!
