5 Strategies to Stop Revenue Leaks

Revenue leakage—when a company loses money, unintentionally or without noticing—is a major silent killer of profitability.

A large part of revenue leakage can be linked to errors in billing—whether it is from under-billing your clients, unpaid or overdue invoices, data entry errors, or incorrect project cost accounting. In addition to leaving your company vulnerable to costly billing and payroll errors, manually reviewing employee timesheets can be a very time-consuming and frustrating process. Payroll preparation is often delayed by late timesheets, wrong job codes, and after-the-fact administrative adjustments that have your accounting team banging their heads against their desks. There is, however, an often overlooked solution to make time tracking and billing procedures easier on your employees; using an automated timesheet solution would greatly reduce these setbacks.

In the current global economic environment, business leaders are forced to make difficult choices and cut back on expenses wherever possible just to keep their companies up and running. But rather than get rid of valuable employees and programs in order to cut costs, why not implement strategic changes that will increase project productivity and streamline payroll and other processes? Here are 5 simple ways to reduce revenue leakage and save money for your business:

1. Centralize Your Timesheets

Managing timesheets in a centralized system can help you streamline the way your team enters their time and expenses, especially if you can set up automated reminders when timesheets are due and follow-up reminders if they aren’t submitted on time. This helps make sure that time is tracked to the correct task or project, further alleviating any discrepancies that may arise. A cloud-based time tracking solution will provide you with a single source of truth for employee time data. You can also consider a solution that has options for time entry, such as time clocks, web-based entry, and/or a mobile app—so your workforce can easily enter their time while on the job without having to log into a desktop—which automatically syncs mobile timesheet data with the central system for even greater accuracy.

2. Focus on Accurate Client Billing

Inefficient, manual processes will directly cause your company’s money to slip away. If employees are wasting valuable work time on redundant, manual tasks, which could simply be automated and taken off their plates, then they will have less time to focus on producing real results that help grow the business. This is an important fact to keep in mind when deciding the best possible way to bill clientele, as inefficient and error-prone billing will lead to larger costs for your company in general. Additionally, managers must be able to monitor and validate in a timely manner how much time their team is spending on billable projects versus non-billable work, so they can catch discrepancies early in the cycle. Setting up a workflow that can automatically request and capture management approval of employee timesheets will ensure better accuracy and timeliness. It also gives your accounting staff the confidence to send invoices to customers as soon as possible.

3. Optimize Labor Resources

Without centralized access to labor hours and employee time off requests, managers lack visibility into how effectively they are utilizing their workforce. That’s why a dynamic, customizable time tracking system is essential to maximize productivity and resource use. Setting up your team with the right tools and technology makes it easier to manage employee time entries and provides quick access to real-time data, so managers are better equipped to monitor the status of their projects and allocate future resources. If you have clearer insights into resource allocation, you can avoid overbooking or underutilizing your labor resources. The more optimized your labor costs are, the more effectively you can control possible leaks.

4. Improve Project Cost Accounting

With robust timesheet reporting capabilities and easy access to historical data, your organization is in a much better position to forecast project costs and resource availability. By implementing a best-of-breed time tracking solution for your company, managers can examine the time spent on similar projects in the past, and they can make better predictions about how many hours will be required for future jobs or tasks, or how many employees need to be assigned to a project. Time tracking software such as that offered by Journyx will allow you to monitor availability and capacity across your entire resource pool. Those solutions give you the tools to confidently assign the right personnel to the right work by more accurately tracking productivity and performance.

5. Automate Your Organization Whenever Possible

Many organizations rely on spreadsheets to manage projects and time tracking for their employees. This manual process can be extremely cumbersome, creating a significant amount of administrative work to ensure that timesheets are filled out correctly and submitted on time. Additionally, having a manual system means that past data is harder to access, meaning that you could be losing valuable information that could better your future performance as an organization. Maximizing efficiency by automating processes that aren’t necessary to do manually will create a smaller margin of error for your business overall, while steadily making improvements to your bottom line.

Download the free guide for more info: How to Stop Revenue Leakage with Better Time Tracking