4 Most Popular Questions Professionals Ask About Timesheets

Learn how AI powered timesheets can help your employees be more productive and your organization more profitable

“Timekeeping is stuck in the 20th century. It’s basically a digital version of an analog method. Right now is the perfect time to reimagine how it’s done.”
– Nick West, Chief Strategy Officer at Mishcon De Reya

Introduction

Time tracking is a major problem well recognized by most CXOs across industries and yet timesheets rarely get a lot of good press among employees. Who likes to sign tons of papers just to “prove” that they had put in a certain amount of hours in a certain project. However, timesheets, when seen from an analytical perspective, can be truly beneficial for both managers and their team members. The key is to choose the correct solution for your group, set up processes you can follow intuitively, and bolster it with progressing communication. In this article, I will share provocative reasoning as to why you need timesheets and a couple of examples of how AI can make time tracking easier for the employer and less painful for an employee.

#1) What are timesheets?

Professional services are a billable hours-driven industry. It would be handy if we knew how much time is spent on which project and by who. Timesheets contain pre-formatted fields in which daily tasks performed by each employee are filled. It not only helps Project Leaders and HR Managers, but it also helps the employees plan their day better. These timesheets when analysed over a period of time help us understand the current status of our projects as well as predict future manpower and cost requirements.

2) Are employees wasting time at work?

It is easy to grumble about how employees nowadays simply don’t have hard-working attitudes or work ethic, however having the option to back that up with real insights? However, having the option to back that up with real insights is invaluable.

Invaluable.

A recent study from sample aggregated form similar companies shows that:

• 65% of the employees waste 1 hour or less per day

• 25% of the employees waste 2 hours or less per day

• 10% of the employees waste 3 hours or more per day

Statistics even show that those born in the 1980s waste almost 4 times as much time as those born in the 1940s. Some may even extrapolate that with access to so many distractions and short attention span millennials waste the most time.

But who is to confirm such in-the-air judgments? That is why you need a professional time tracking solution to make employees accountable for their time thus driving maximum productivity for the hours they are being paid for.

3) How Artificial Intelligence can optimize time tracking?

Employees would rather take the time to justify a list of things they would want to do instead of filling out their timesheets. Make filling out these mundane things easier for your employees by using AI.

Here are some of the features that are most desired from AI powered timesheets:

• Location-based time-tracking  – A GPS sensor-enabled smartphone helps the automated time and attendance tracking of in-field personnel. This solution applies to all professional services companies that deploy manpower on client sites and also to organizations that deploy feet-on-street sales professionals.
• Time spent on apps tracking – In our daily work, we often switch between applications and websites according to tasks. How much time did you spend on going through emails? Or attending meetings? Or graphic designing a new ad? We need to measure it to find out hours spent on each channel against business impact made.

4) What is the use of timesheet data?

Imagine a company with hundreds of employees where everybody working on multiple assignments and managers are responsible to control revenue, expenses, profit, capacity, utilization, and other metrics.Easy access to the daily fresh data about professionals’ hours is the major component controlling these parameters and forecasting future business growth and making correct decisions to your business now.

Business analytics are required after timesheets are prepared, and that might be an annoying but necessary task for any consulting or professional services firm. On a weekly or monthly basis, managers need to prepare performance reports answering such questions:

• What is the current state of a project?
• What will occur in the event that we roll out these improvements for the group?
• How do project execution timeline, expenses, and billables impact the profitability?
• How have past decisions affected KPIs?

Answers to all these questions need to be backed by data and that is where timesheets serve their ultimate purpose.

Conclusion

Typically, a Timesheet module integrated into a cost-effective Office Management Solution like Juntrax is ideal for SMEs and startups as it reduces redundancy and integrates data with Leave Management, Project Scheduling and Project costing modules. A good Timesheet report would provide project-wise and  team-wise time spent and cost incurred across multiple time horizons. Juntrax also offers to manage your project billables and invoicing on a single integrated platform. The benefit of tracking such man-hours is better project planning, cost planning, productivity analysis and predictable project deliveries. Time is money and judicious use of time earns you more money!