Employee timesheets are often
misunderstood. Why do we need to manage employee timesheets? Are they useful
for monitoring employees’ day-to-day activities or billing the client? Do we need
them to measure an employee’s productivity, or is it a mere form of
micromanagement that managers pursue to their advantage? Well… there’s a lot to
be answered here.
Why
Do We Need Online Timesheet Management for Employees?
Any business managing 15 to 15,000 employees
(or even more) need to control their continuously increasing business
maintenance costs and keep a track of employees’ work hours. Timesheet
management is the best way to get accurate information on the activities and
projects where employees are spending their time. Timesheets help employees to
stay competitive and productive.
The paper documents or spreadsheets are
not enough to keep records of an employee activities along the course of a day
or a week. Tracking employee work hours manually with overtime, leaves and holidays
becomes a tedious and cumbersome task for managers and HR. In addition, it is
difficult for managers to ensure that their team members employed at remote
locations are working to their full potential. To avoid assuming what employees
are really doing, to identify an employee’s workload or availability, and to track
real-time progress of project(s), there’s a need of an effective online timesheet
management system.
A cloud-based employee time tracking software is an automated system that allow
managers to easily track, manage and report on employee time. It improves
project visibility and helps managers to understand resource utilization.
Surprisingly, many organizations are
unaware of benefits of employee time tracking software, and they deal with multiple challenges.
Let’s take a look.
Challenges
of an Organization in Absence of Employee Timesheet Management
Project Billing Inaccuracies: Quite often, employees and managers rely on their memories to recall
and record time spent on client site. Due to this, the manual billing reports
may subject to human errors leading to inaccurate project bills.
Inadequate Resource Allocation: In absence of an employee timesheet management system, managers
are unable to distribute equal workload amongst all team members. Without
knowing the availability of a team member and time taken to complete a task,
managers often face challenge to allocate resource (developer or designer or
any other professional) for a specific task/ project.
Inaccuracy to Find Billable Employee Work Hours: When ‘buddy punching’ and paper time cards become common, many
employers face difficulties to track employee in-and-out time accurately.
Due to
inefficient tracking of employee in-and-out time, break times, overtime, leaves
and official travel,employers find it hard to bill the employees working on
hourly basis.
Unable to Track Progress of Projects and Identify Delays:
In absence of timesheet management, managers are
unable to track real-time progress of a specific project. Without timesheet
reports and views, managers aren’t able to access consolidated data required to
view and avoid project delays.
In an advanced HR technology era,
timesheet management is a necessary process to track employee activities, performance
and project management.
The implementation of online timesheet
management helps in eliminating the differences in opinion of an employee and a
manager regarding project progress and resource availability. Furthermore, it
is an effective way to make business accounting accurate and stress-free.
A cloud-based timesheet management system,
such as Empxtrack, allows organizations to keep down project operational costs
along with managing employee time effectively. Here’s a list of few benefits that
would compel you to invest in an employee time tracking system.
Benefits
of an Employee Time Tracking Software
Improve Employee Performance: When employees know that their performance and activities are being monitored,
they tend to be more conscious of spending most of their time in improving their
work output. Of course, this awareness translates into improved performance and
high quality of work.
Besides,
monitoring employee activities continuously enables managers to adapt any sudden
problem that arise. The problems are handled quickly without wasting much time.
This adds up to employee productivity and the projects are completed within predefined
timeline.
Identify Employee Workload & Availability:An automated employee time tracking software gives deep insights into
employee performance, project staffing and resource utilization. Effective
decisions can be made by identifying the workload and availability of each team
member. This improves overall team performance.
Timely Allocation of Resources: Timesheet management is directly related to resource planning &
allocation and task management. Managers can anticipate delays in tasks when
knowing the actual project status. With the online timesheets, managers may conveniently
change the schedule or reassign any urgent tasks to the available team members.
All these smart decisions contribute to high performance and success of every
single project.
Correct Cost Estimate of the Projects: An organization using online timesheets for employees can accurately estimate
the number of hours an employee spends at the client site or on a project. This
information satisfies clients knowing that their bills are fairly calculated.
Accurate Accounting in Employee Time: The detailed information about project hours helps an organization
to accurately record employee’s billable work hours and pay accordingly. With a
cloud-based attendance management and timesheet management software,employees’
performance is monitored at each step. Thus, they are unable to use excuses for
their unproductive behaviour and excessive absenteeism.
Still
unsure??
I would recommend you to use an employee time
tracking software for superior team monitoring. Understand how this advanced
online tool can shift your focus from day-to-day employee time tracking to growing
your business. Online timesheet management system works
faster and accurate, and therefore can be used to eliminate time-consuming &
tedious time tracking work!