Time tracker is online software allowing to easily capture work hours spent on tasks, projects, and assessments.
Used by many industry sectors: mostly by hourly workers, remote staff and all those who’d like to see into the time spent and analyze it for better performance, workload planning, and business progress. It also helps maintain and prioritize work-life balance and becomes a new business management trend in the post-pandemic world.
Depending on the available features, a time tracker can also serve as an employee time clock, a business or personal productivity tool, and an attendance management system.
When using time tracking software to check attendance, you can dive into not only the recorded hours, employees’ online or offline absence, and presence, but you have a digital helper to prevent burnout based on the data about time off. Besides, when using such software your HR team won’t be overloaded thanks to process automation and fast access to data.
An employee time clock speaks for itself: in this scenario, a time tracker helps calculate working hours, days, and breaks, and provides reporting for data analysis and payroll.
Time tracking enables employees to effectively manage their working time and workload, be flexible, and see how much time they devote to projects and tasks. As a result, they will stay productive while performing at work, and business efficiency will grow.
Last but not least, time trackers help focus on one task to avoid multitasking, store time records that can be analyzed for optimizing time utilization, and log billable hours for better billing efficiency.
Who Uses Time Tracking
No doubt, time tracking can be deployed by any professional for daily use at work and for personal use. Apart from saving time, it gives the means to streamline projects and tasks, enjoy flexible schedules, get a clear idea of activity and productivity peaks, build trust with clients, and contribute to overall business progress.
Time tracking will suit the best:
Freelance. For freelancers, time tracking is an essential part of work to create accountability of the work process, collaborate with customers, and ensure timely payments for the performed projects.
Marketers. With time tracking software, they get the luxury of analyzing work processes and organizing them into a streamlined workflow.
Sales teams. The representatives of these teams keep track of their tickets, productivity, and work time with the help of time tracking to stay efficient during the shifts, including if the teammates are located around the globe.
Business owners. To prevent loss in revenue, troubles with business planning, and successfully face challenges with meeting deadlines, businesses apply time tracking practices.
Design. Time tracking is a perfect solution for all kinds of design projects. It lets designers perform meaningful work without sacrificing time and effort for calculations.
Consultants. Time trackers bring automation to consulting processes, help invoice clients, and generate clear reports to see what projects and clients are the most profitable.
HR teams. Time tracking facilitates HR processes to stay on top of employees’ time off, keep records of billable hours of hourly staff, ensure proper monetary compensation, and store information about the workforce in one app. Visibility of every team along with flexibility in management is guaranteed.
Developers. If adopting a time tracker for daily work, software developers will polish their time management skills for wise time allocation and better performance in every project.
Legal practice. When lawyers want to create the best work environment they implement time tracking which becomes a foundation for smooth operations to calculate work time precisely and effortlessly.
Support teams. It’s possible to track how much time support engineers allocate to tickets, categorize time on support activities, and monitor overall performance.
Students. With the basic function of time tracking, such software helps students keep track of online activity and set deadlines for paperwork.
Benefits of Time Tracking
As described above, time tracking comes with obvious benefits for both individuals and businesses, such as increased productivity, better awareness of how much projects and tasks take, and better time utilization.
However, before implementing a time tracker, one needs to determine the reasons why they need a time tracker to find the solution that meets their needs and requirements the best. This way the benefits of using time tracking practices can be visible and bring to success.
Moreover, managers of remote and globally distributed teams have no other perfect solution than time tracking to stay connected and efficient in their performance. The advanced functionality of a time tracker helps them see report data with recorded time and activity, and so always know what tasks and projects are being worked on, and whether the members are overloaded.
A shift to working from home and then a reset to a hybrid work model have been an inevitable result of the pandemic, and they required some new approaches to time management by employees in various teams. The use of time tracking has made their work stress-free and established the desired work-life balance.
Types of Time Trackers
Depending on the functionality, we can break down time tracking into two main categories: manual and automatic.
Manual time tracking means the users can add the hours to the timeline without starting and stopping the timer. They simply add a time entry with a brief description and duration manually or fill out a timesheet or a timecard.
Automatic time tracking is performed by software that records every second of the time as well as all websites and apps you open while working on a laptop or PC.
These actions can be performed in a web-based or desktop system, or mobile application of a time tracker. In different scenarios and business needs, freelancers and companies apply the needed type of time tracking to achieve their goals.
Timesheets and timecards are deployed to calculate how many hours and days employees attend work and how they are engaged in the work activities. This ensures accurate payroll, and besides may be required to comply with the law in a number of countries.
Mobile time clock solutions provide field representatives with means of clocking in and out by using their mobile devices: in this case, the employees capture time and attendance data manually on the phones providing their geolocation, enabling businesses to go paperless and offering data to evaluate the labor expenses.
Automatic time tracking software creates flexibility as it comes with a helpful set of features including time tracking. It captures work hours automatically after starting the timer, syncs data across any device and platform, detects breaks and absences, and integrates with calendar events. It’s a powerful solution for businesses to automate the operations of the teams and process payroll in a reliable way.
Features in Brief
Features of time trackers vary depending on their target audience. Still, along with time tracking, most of them support modules for the project and team management, PTO calculations, money tracking, and payroll. Below the main functionality is highlighted.
Time tracking options allow recording time, work, and billable hours on any device.
With online work scheduling, it’s possible to manage the work hours of individual employees and teams and configure shifts and holiday time.
Project management is an integral part when it comes to managing project timelines, budgets, and estimates. And you’ll be able to monitor work in progress not to miss the deadlines.
Having a clear image of employee productivity is possible with team management options.
Time trackers automate billing and invoicing to make you have a smooth workflow and save your time on routine paperwork and manual money calculations.
With PTO options the employees have a simple way to ask for days off, and employers can check attendance, see time off balances and prevent burnout.
To gain data about time records, project progress, and payroll reporting comes to the rescue. There are different kinds of reports including tasks, projects and activity summaries, detailed reports about time records and apps and websites visited while working.
Thanks to the integrations with other services time tracking can be enabled in any favorite management tool. This truly helps keep tasks on track and builds effective workflows in a few clicks.
