Time tracking is the process of tracking employee working time in hours so that you know how they spent their time.

No matter what the type or size of business you run, keeping track of your employees’ time is extremely important.

As a boss or manager, you already know the importance of time in your business and trying to get all your employees to log their time is a daunting task. Additionally, maintaining manual timesheets can bring up issues like partiality, favouritism, dishonesty and even time theft.

Time tracking is key to discovering exactly how employees work, where they struggle, how they misuse time, and helps you to better understand their work patterns.

Tracking time is one of the core keys to productivity, insight, and a balanced workflow. This is equally important for everyone working in an organization, whether you are a to everybody in an organization, or society, in general. Whether you’re an executive, a senior employee, a manager, or a team member, keeping track of your time is supreme.

This is why time tracking is so important.But when it comes to business, many questions arise like: How to track time? What is the best time tracking software? How to implement time tracking for projects? What are the best practices for time-tracking? In this guide, we’ll try our best to answer them all. So let’s get into it.

What is time tracking?

As we have already explained, time tracking is the measurement of hours of their employees work. This measurement of hours also makes sure hourly employees are being compensated accordingly.

Time entries is a safeguard for managers to measure how efficiently an employee works and how much time it takes for them to complete their assigned task.

By seeing the report, when you find out which tasks take the most time, you can take necessary action to resolve the issue. When you will dig deeper, you will find out other benefits of time tracking software other than just hourly data and business insight.

Top 5 Benefits of Employee Time Tracking

A survey conducted by Harvard Business shows how the U.S. businesses waste a wholesome $7.4 billion a day in productivity only because of employees who haven’t recorded their hours. For businesses, it is really important to know how much time their employees spend at work and also to get the numerous benefits of doing time tracking include:

1. Provides Transparency

By implementing time tracking software you automatically make your business more transparent. It allows you to completely scrutinize employee working processes, offers detailed insights in how the task was done and the overall duration for individual tasks It lets you understand employee efficiency to distribute projects as per their ability.

The tracking tool also helps employees to better understand their own work activities and let them optimize productivity where needed. When an employee finds out he is taking extra hours to complete a similar task which his other co-workers are finishing in less time, it automatically makes them more productive to finish the task within the deadline.

2. Increased accountability in employees

When employees know the digital clock is capturing their work activities and keeping the record of it in its dashboard for their managers to see, it automatically makes them productive towards their task. At this point, everyone realizes that the clock is ticking and this whole process increases accountability in employees.

3. Understand your billing and operational efficiency

Time tracking is key to improve operational efficiency if you are working in a service business. You can easily track how much time an individual contractor spends as well as the entire organization. You can track their working hours and productivity, knowing how productive your employees can help you run a more profitable business.

4. Streamline reporting and invoicing

Time tracking software is a solid investment to streamline how you prepare reports and invoice time spent at work. The automated software does everything for you, which means you don’t lose moments each week to calculate their billable hours, attendance and productivity metrics. Reports are generated inside the dashboard and are stored there for months. The accuracy of time tracking software in providing reports for both large and small companies is extremely valuable. It is also beneficial for companies that rely heavily on freelancers or hourly contractors.

5. Improves Employee Morale

Time tracking software can actually strengthen feelings of trust and respect in your employees which improves their performance and overall productivity.When time tracking is absent from the working environment, it creates lots of doubts in employers and presents a greater chance for micromanagement. Micromanagement damages employee’s morale as every aspect of their job increases stress, which can be disheartening as they fear making any kind of mistake may cause them to lose their job.

Get started

Before introducing time tracking software in your organization, you’ll have to think about how your employees will take the news. Let your employees know the good side of it and the importance of it for your company. As an owner or manager, use the time tracking insights and data to steer your organization in the right direction and ensure that every individual employee works efficiently and productively, with the same vision in mind.

Now that you know the benefits of time tracking, book a meeting with the best time tracking software in the market or start a free 14-day trial, and learn more about how CloudDesk can help your organization to use their time more productively and the proper allocation of resources across projects and tasks.