Time Tracking for Improved ROI

Organizations around the world are always looking to elevate the way they manage employees’ time and productivity. Particularly because of the major shift in workplace dynamics over the last few years, maintaining employee effectiveness and discovering the best methods for minimizing menial tasks to improve employee satisfaction while optimizing resources have become priorities. 

As your organization considers how to improve time tracking, it is essential to consider your time tracking system. Even though ROI (Return on Investment) is a straightforward principle, it can be difficult to realistically calculate, especially when you are considering less tangible (but nonetheless valuable) impacts on saving time and preventing employee burnout. 

While almost any accounting or financial management solution should provide baseline time and expense collection tools, most solutions will lack the more powerful tools that give real visibility to your workforce data and/or to allow for any complexity that your business requires.  

Here, we will explore how robust time tracking solutions can provide a stronger ROI by improving experiences for members at every level of your organization and supporting the most accurate workforce time analysis to optimize resource allocation and project management for your workforce. 

How do automated time tracking solutions increase ROI for your organization? 

• Eliminating manual tasks: reduce the time it takes to fill out, submit, and approve timesheets, and integrate data automatically with other business systems to improve efficiency. 
• Clarifying value and reducing errors: Empower employees to track and manage their time themselves to accurately see the value of your workforce, and use intelligent data validation to prevent errors. 
• Improving scheduling for better workforce utilization: provide insight into your employees’ activities to reduce unnecessary costs from an unbalanced distribution of work. 
• Providing intelligent suggestions and automatic reporting: the best time tracking systems can provide automated reminders of timesheet submission deadlines and approvals that might be needed, eliminating the time required for manual follow-up. Some systems can even be set to run and deliver reports on a regular basis to alleviate the repetitive work required to do so otherwise. 

Eliminating Manual Tasks 

How much time do each of your employees take filling out timesheets manually? 

Even if your employees are only spending 15 minutes over the course of each week manually tracking their time, eliminating this manual entry can quickly add up. Multiply that by the number of employees and your average hourly salary to see how quickly the time adds up and how costly manual timekeeping can be for your business.  

Insert your own numbers to see what impact time savings could have on your business. 

Now consider how much time payroll admins spend tracking down timesheets and approvals. When you add this wasted time to your calculations as well, you can see how inefficient manual time tracking can be. 

Even more time can be saved by streamlining timesheet approval and using a time tracking solution that integrates with your payroll system directly. 

By utilizing software that automatically delivers workforce data where it is needed for approval and processing, you can avoid wasting your employees’ time with menial data entry and account for payroll seamlessly and easily. 

Integration with your accounting software—whether it’s Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, QuickBooks, or other ERP systems—to automate timesheet processing for payroll, project management, and HR, reduces the need for duplicate data entry and helps reduce errors 

As you can see, automation can make an enormous improvement for your ROI by eliminating time-consuming busy work. By saving a little time for every employee, every week, you can free up your employees’ time to deliver even more value to your customers and your organization. 

Clarifying Value and Reducing Errors 

How can you get a clear view of the value your workforce creates? 

Investing in software that makes it easy for employees to track their time and task completion also delivers powerful results for your ROI. 

If your time tracking software makes it difficult for employees to keep track of time and tasks, it will be impossible to gain an accurate top-down perspective of resource utilization, capacity, and performance. Consider how customized project and activity-based time categorization can provide powerful visibility to previous, ongoing, and future projects. 

Your timekeeping system should empower your workforce to track their time accurately from anywhere, whether your employees are working in an office setting, working from home, or working on the road from multiple locations. A web-based, easy-to-use system can provide the data your organization needs to monitor productivity and allocate resources efficiently. 

How do errors detract from workforce clarity in your organization? 

Measuring the real value of preventing errors may be one of the most challenging aspects of ROI analysis when it comes to time tracking solutions.  

Human error wastes time, can result in lost income, and pollutes workforce data with inaccuracies. Without clear, high quality workforce data, finding where your employees are succeeding and where resources are not being utilized to their fullest potential can become impossible. And these issues are compounded when errors and inaccuracies lead to employee frustration and customer dissatisfaction.  

To deliver the best ROI, your time and expense tracking solution should do everything possible to reduce errors. Intelligent data validation rules can help employees enter time and expenses accurately, give managers confidence in the accuracy of submitted timesheets, and ensure that invoices and billing matches customer expectations. 

Partnered with accurate workforce data, having real-time visibility for your employee’s activity is a must. Giving supervisors and managers access to real-time reporting, with up to the minute visibility of tasks and activities in an easy-to-use reports system, enables everyone in your organization to work more efficiently. 

Improving Scheduling for Better Workforce Utilization 

How can you ensure your employees’ efforts are being optimally coordinated? 

For many organizations, especially those with large hourly labor workforces, scheduling can be a time-consuming task. If the time tracking solution for your organization is not able to integrate with scheduling automation technology, you will be missing significant opportunities to optimize workforce operations. 

Whenever possible, your organization should be making informed and data-driven decisions, but if you are managing your employee scheduling manually, it is easy to let old habits drive your labor costs higher. Putting the wrong resources on the job and overspending on underutilized labor will quickly eat into your margins. And similarly, overutilization of the same employees can create unnecessary overtime costs and lead to burnout. 

By using scheduling software that integrates directly with your time tracking solution, you can automate shift scheduling, account for staff availability and skillsets, and improve efficiency, all while saving time and money for your organization. Integration between your time tracking and scheduling allows for immediate visibility of workforce allocation and in-depth cost forecasting, allowing you to make informed decisions about scheduling to drive a better ROI. 

Providing Intelligent Suggestions and Automatic Reporting 

How can you expedite day-to-day activities and keep your operations running smoothly? 

Advanced automated time tracking software offers numerous ways to cut down on extra time spent on vital business operations, from smart timesheets that pre-populate data, to automatically generating reports at a scheduled interval. Reducing the time employees take to perform business operations gives them more time to work on what matters most. 

When considering a timekeeping solution, look for tools and features that can provide immediate value to your organization such as the following: 

• Data-driven suggestions for time or expense entries (that improve over time with use) so that employees can simply select the day, select a project (including billable and non-billable projects), and enter their time without having to remember complicated codes. 
• Smart timesheets that pre-populate data using custom rules, previous entries, and information pulled from your other existing business systems (such as calendars, tasks, email, phone logs, project tools, etc.) with intelligent suggestions to make data entry easier. 
• Automatic reminders for employees to submit timesheets at the end of a pay period, and the ability to easily upload receipt images from their desktop or mobile device, to make payroll and cost accounting faster and more accurate.  
• Management workflows that simplify timesheet review, validation, and approvals— including dashboards that include a snapshot of team submissions.  

If you’re interested in learning more about how time tracking software can drive better ROI for your organization, contact Journyx today to see how our premier time tracking solutions provide all these features and more.