How Project Time Tracking Can Transform Your Business

Between 2017 and 2020, the US Department of Labor launched over 7000 cases of violation and recovered $3.4 billion on account of wage or time theft from organizations of all sizes. 

In a more recent development, the Big Four accounting firms in Spain came under the scanner of the Ministry of Labor for making employees work long hours amid growing concerns about the lack of compliance with labor and social security laws. 

These high-profile cases are some of the many instances where organizations have paid hefty fines, depending on the degree of the violations and regional regulations.

The examples above underline the importance of accurately tracking project time to comply with varying labor laws and payroll requirements. Organizations have long used manual time-tracking processes and siloed systems to manage their project time-tracking requirements. 

However, the idea of tracking project time using time-tracking solution, powered by transformational technologies like Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), has gained much greater traction in the past few years due to the changing dynamics of the marketplace and an increase in the variety of employee types.  

Add to that, labor market churns and rationalized client spending on projects have put unprecedented pressure on profit margins, forcing businesses to streamline their processes and find innovative ways for greater agility. 

As a result, digital transformation has become common as small, medium, and large-sized organizations quickly adapt to new ways of working and automate administrative and repetitive tasks, freeing up employee billable work hours for more productive and business-critical activities. Many companies are embracing workflow automation examples to streamline their operations and increase efficiency.

While digital transformation has been a recurring theme of discussion in the boardrooms since the pandemic came knocking, it’s usually misinterpreted as a massive undertaking, which entails making sweeping changes to the existing organizational processes. 

Truth be told, tracking project time efficiently by automating time-tracking processes can yield huge gains for businesses, aside from helping them stay on top of a myriad of compliance requirements. Even such seemingly simple changes to the existing processes can proffer transformational benefits for businesses. 

Here Are the Top 8 Ways This Can Happen: 

1. Improved Resource Utilization

The shift from brick-and-mortar setups to digital offices has complicated project managers’ task of efficiently tracking and managing their teams. Without in-person meetings and teams working across geographies, work shifts, and time zones, manual time-tracking processes can leave organizations susceptible to inefficient resource allocation and utilization. 

This way, businesses can lose out on revenue. 

That’s why automated project time-tracking is a great way to ensure that managers have real-time visibility into whether or not their resources are under or over-utilized. This insight can help project managers allocate resources to projects judiciously, ensuring optimal utilization of resources for higher productivity and profitability, without causing employee burnout and attrition.

1. Lower Employee Burnout and Attrition

Employee burnout has been a real and consistent challenge since businesses pivoted quickly to the remote way of working. This led to higher-than-usual attrition rates as employees found themselves working longer hours and under high pressure to deliver on their tasks. Plus, the absence of in-person interactions compounded the challenge. 

Automating time-tracking processes can help enterprises enhance their employees’ efficiency and productivity levels while ensuring that they don’t face burnout due to excessive work. This can be done by identifying areas where:

• tasks can be automated
• downtime can be minimized
• training can be provided to enhance the quality of work and more.

This way, organizations can effectively address the challenge of heightened attrition and ensure employees’ concerns proactively.  

1. Plugging in Efficiency Gaps

Efficient project time-tracking solutions help business leaders as they benefit from continuous, accurate, and complete insights into employee efficiency gaps. 

Plus, AI-powered timesheets enable managers to capture their teams’ time spent on various projects. Hence, transitioning from manual to automated processes empowers organizations with complete control and the ability to easily interpret vast tracts of data. 

1. Adherence to Payroll and Labor Compliance

Time tracking tools allow organizations to accurately track employee billable and non-billable hours and the in/out time by project. This way, they can bill their customers quickly and be assured of adhering to payroll and labor regulations. 

The timesheets are pre-populated, allowing project resources to accurately complete them and easily submit them. Besides, such time-tracking platforms feature real-time GPS tracking and geofencing capabilities to help better manage the remote project workforce.

These unified solutions have a built-in compliance feature. Therefore, they collect error-free and compliant data at the time entry level and enforce schedule adherence. This helps comply with global and local time off policies as well as working time directives. 

This way, organizations can meet statutory labor law requirements by enforcing maximum work hours, meal breaks, rest breaks, overtime, and minimum break lengths. Plus, they can enforce mandatory breaks and manage violations in real-time by allowing employees to waive break violations and consequent penalties. 

1. Accurate Project Delivery 

Project time tracking software is equipped to manage multi-level client projects, as managers can create such projects, define project milestones, and set up relevant information. 

The software enables real-time project tracking, helping gain instant visibility for timely project billing, besides giving comprehensive insights into profitability and performance. These insights arm project managers with crucial information to make proactive decisions and manage service delivery in the now.

1. Superior Visibility Into Validations and Notifications

A time-tracking solution ensures zero billing errors by utilizing advanced timesheet validations. Besides, it offers real-time notifications, which can help the timely submission of bills for processing time and billing. 

Since these platforms use configurable business validations, organizations can ensure all data follow their unique policies. 

1. Plugging in Revenue Leakages  

With time tracking, organizations can set time and cost budgets for each project or task. Then, they can roll up to get estimates that help with better planning. It enables real-time tracking of resource hours associated with projects, plugging in 100% revenue leakage. 

Besides, managers can account for all resource costs and compare the budgets to make proactive billing decisions. 

1. Better Management of Mobile Workforces 

Designed to manage mobile workforces, project time tracking solutions enable anytime, anywhere capture of client project data, with or without Internet connectivity. A time-tracking solution is usually equipped with GPS time tracking, which allows managers to leverage the location details tagged to the mobile timesheet entries. They can use this data to make informed project decisions.

Project managers can review and approve client project time and expenses while even on the go. Resources can instantly upload digital receipts and attachments to reduce lost information and eliminate timesheet submission and approval delays, leading to enhanced accuracy in time and billing. 

Conclusion

Project time tracking is integral to the organizational desire for greater profitability, whether or not it’s through improving resource utilization and employee productivity, strengthening resource allocation, reducing billing and costing errors, etc. Unlocking time-tracking efficiencies, therefore, can have a massive impact on lending greater agility and, ultimately, potentially transforming the business for the better. 

Author: Shashank Shekhar has been a digital and content marketing professional for over 9 years. He specializes in writing about technology trends like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and their impact on shaping the project management landscape with tools like professional services automation solutions and time-tracking solutions. Outside of work, he loves reading about history, astrophysics, and geopolitics.