Employee time tracking is becoming more and more popular with every passing day, especially for the service industries. Timesheet is primarily a mechanism that can provide you real-time visibility of the project you are dealing with and ensure greater business profitability by improving staff efficiency.
Before choosing secure timesheets, you should first know what a timesheet is.
Water Are Timesheets?
A timesheet is a data table used by an employer to track the work hours clocked in by a specific employee. Businesses use timesheets to record the time spent on projects, tasks, or clients.
Different methods are used for recording timesheets like paper, excel or spreadsheet format, and online tracking software. The paper-based timesheets have evolved to their digital counterparts now to suit current standards.
Why Use Timesheets?
Here are some of the primary reasons why companies are employing timesheets to manage their work.
* Reduce Wastage of Time
Timesheets can make you understand where the valuable labor is being wasted. They help identify those tasks that take more time than required or are necessary and help you make decisions to optimize those tasks in a better way.
* Automatic and Accurate Billing
Timesheets enable accurate billing. They are one way of making your clients aware that you are efficiently handling their projects and that their money is put to the best use. The clients do not have to constantly worry about the status of their projects when you employ timesheets that show how much time you are dedicating to them and their service. This also proves how accurate the billing that you created is.
Organizations use timesheets for billing when they render services to clients based on their billable hours. By automating the process of invoicing and billing, timesheets help you to decrease your costs.
* Identify Training Needs and Manage Workload
Timesheets reveal when an employee takes up more than what is estimated or allocated for a particular task.
Completed timesheets present where employees are investing most of their effort and time. This helps you to distribute the work more equitably to increase productivity.
* Improve Estimates and Agility
The timesheets help you glean information from them and store them in your database. This offers more accurate estimates to the clients about costs, time, and resources.
Once you start tracking time correctly, it can assist you and your team in becoming more agile. It can simplify and make it easier to modify issues along the way.
* Save Money for Your Company
Timesheets tell you what exactly your employees are working on. They keep track of your workers by comparing their output and the amount of time they work for. With the help of timesheets, you can spot those employees who cost your company money and yet perform poorly. As they help you detect who is productive and who’s not, you can save a lot of money for your business with the help of timesheets.
How to Secure Your Company’s Timesheets?
Filling up timesheets manually is naturally uncomfortable for employees who have almost forgotten handwritten notes. Moreover, the information just ends up getting lost in a pile with these timesheets. What’s more, you spend hours sitting by the paper shredder a few years later to protect business confidentiality.
Thankfully, you can do away with the paper timesheets and make your employee time tracking entirely online. The best part is that online timesheets are more convenient and secure.
With online project management software, you can manage the entire employee timesheets in a single secure system.
Online timesheets enable you to lock them up electronically. As a result, you can keep anyone from altering the data or information contained in them. Once a manager approves the timesheet provided by the employee, they can secure or protect it to ensure that what arrives at payroll is similar to what they have approved of.
By opting for secure timesheets, you are adding a valuable asset to your company or business. But keep in mind a few things to make the most of this feature.
Make it a point not to lose the trust factor as this can make your people feel monitored and untrustworthy.
The best way to avoid this is by being honest with your employees and telling them that it’s normal to log anything between 6 to 8 hours each day. It would ensure transparency from their side, and they wouldn’t feel the pressure to log more time than was required to complete the task.
This is an excellent way of making the most of your timesheets and work reports which will genuinely benefit your business in the long run.
