Time Tracking

Why Productive Companies Track Their Time

To track or not to track? If you run a service-based business, AI time-tracking software is essential. Here’s why.
Running a business involves various costs, including salaries, taxes, benefits, building fees, software, hardware, furniture, and more.

Additional perks include team outings, office snacks, happy hours, training, travel, and staff meals. To cover these expenses and remain profitable, it’s crucial to understand the cost of completing deliverables.

Time tracking helps quantify these costs, making managing expenses easier and ensuring profitability. One effective tool for this purpose is Flowace, a time tracker that simplifies the process and provides valuable insights into your business operations.

Exploring Employee Time Tracking Solutions

Legal time tracking software is crucial for project managers to monitor employees effectively. Understanding where your team spends their time helps identify if they are over-committed or focusing on the right tasks. According to research by The Drum, workers spend only 27% of their day on tasks directly related to their skills.

Logging hours throughout the day also helps track time spent on projects. For companies that bill clients a fixed amount or must adhere to a budget, monitoring the effort on each task is essential to avoid exceeding hours and losing money.

It’s important to know how work is planned throughout the day, whether based on the amount charged or the estimated time needed for tasks. Once this is established, a reliable method for tracking time is necessary.

However, in the market there are plenty of free software to track employee productivity that promises to deliver the best results. How do you choose the best free time tracking app for employees?

This is where Flowace comes in.

Flowace is a powerful AI software that has increased the productivity of 36,763 users by 31% in just 89 days without disrupting their workflow. Flowace.ai engages with users and managers to motivate them to achieve more in less time while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Flowace has helped organizations to:

• Identify individuals and teams who are genuinely putting in effort, actively focusing on relevant apps and URLs, and consistently performing well.
• Use performance data to eliminate bias and ensure a fair yearly appraisal process.
• Implement extra working day policies with configurable remuneration to prevent moonlighting.
• Provide actionable insights to address process inefficiencies, repetitive trends, idle periods, non-focus time, and distractions.

Transform Your Business with Effective Time Tracking

Automated time-tracking software helps in making important business decisions. Good time management is crucial for productivity and profitability, especially in field service. Implementing a streamlined time-tracking system helps control costs, increase efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.

Flowace excels in project management by combining idealism and productivity, aiming for excellence in every task. This AI tool not only boosts productivity but also prepares your team for future challenges and simplifies workplace complexities.

Key features of Flowace include:

• Recognition and rewards for those handling critical tasks
• Fair evaluations based on performance data, eliminating favouritism
• Deep insights into employee behaviour, time allocation, and project costs
• Easy generation of billable and non-billable hours
• Seamless management of overtime rules and compensation, preventing unauthorized side jobs
• Valuable insights to streamline workflows and reduce time wastage
• Effortless categorization of tasks and activities
• Flowace provides the tools needed to enhance productivity and optimize business operations.

Essential Metrics: What Should You Track?

Tracking employee performance metrics ensures that employee performance aligns with company goals and values and is crucial for individual development. Some essential metrics to track include:

Turnover Rate

This metric measures the number of employees who leave within a specific period. A low turnover rate suggests that employees are satisfied and likely find the work environment positive. Conversely, a high turnover rate can indicate underlying issues that need to be addressed, such as poor management or inadequate benefits.

Employee Satisfaction

This is vital for employee retention programs. It can be assessed through various methods such as surveys, absenteeism rates, and employee net promoter scores (eNPS). High satisfaction levels usually correlate with higher productivity and loyalty, while low levels may indicate a need for organizational changes.

Employee Absenteeism

Frequent absences can signal a lack of dedication or potential issues with job satisfaction. High absenteeism rates might suggest that responsibilities need to be reallocated, or that the work environment requires improvement to boost engagement.

Retention Rate

This metric indicates how long your employees stay with the company. A high retention rate suggests a desirable work environment and effective retention strategies, while a low rate may point to the need for enhanced employee support and engagement initiatives.

Cost per Hire

This metric helps you understand the total cost involved in the recruitment process. It includes expenses such as advertising, interviewing, training, and onboarding. So, when you track this metric, you can identify areas for cost reduction and optimize your recruitment strategies.

Quality of Work

This measures employee productivity by evaluating the completion of deliverables within the required time and to a high standard. It serves as a benchmark for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of employees. This way, you’ll know about the areas that may need improvement or additional training.

The Technical Aspects of Time Tracking Software

Accurate time tracking

A good time tracking software should monitor your team’s efficiency by recording their time in, time out, and even their web and application usage while working. Different software options offer various tracking methods, so selecting one that aligns with your company’s specific needs is essential.

Customizable

A good time tracking app accommodates the diverse needs of its users. Customization allows users to tailor the tool to fit their unique workflows, enhancing efficiency and comfort. This personalized experience can significantly boost overall productivity.

Detailed Reports

Beyond simply tracking hours, a good time tracking system should provide detailed and interactive reports. These reports can break down time spent on various tasks, projects, and activities, offering insights into employee performance and project progress. Comprehensive reporting features might include visualizations like charts and graphs, which make it easier to spot trends and identify areas for improvement. The ability to export reports in various formats (e.g., PDF, Excel) and share them with stakeholders ensures that everyone stays informed.

Multi-user support

Multi-user support is essential for teams of any size. This feature allows multiple employees to use the system simultaneously, with each user having their own account and access to the necessary features.

A good multi-user support also includes basic user management capabilities, such as the ability to assign roles and permissions, ensuring that team members only access the information and tools relevant to their responsibilities.

Efficient project management

Time tracking software should integrate seamlessly with project management processes. This means you can assign tasks to individual employees, set deadlines, and track the number of hours spent on each task

Client and project billing

Integrating time-tracking software with invoicing and accounting tools allows for the direct generation of invoices based on tracked hours. This kicks off the billing process and ensures accuracy in client billing.

Monthly leave count table

Managing employee leave can be cumbersome, but an automated leave count table simplifies this task. This feature tracks requested vacation days, sick leave, and other absences with a clear monthly overview. Managers can quickly see who is available and plan accordingly, reducing the risk of understaffing and ensuring that all leave is recorded and approved.

Advanced user and admin roles

For larger teams, granular control over user access and permissions is crucial with an AI time-tracking app. Advanced user and admin roles allow managers to define what each user can see and do within the software.

For example, administrators might have full access to all features and data, while regular users can only track their own time and view their personal reports. This hierarchical approach helps maintain data security and ensures that users only interact with the parts of the system relevant to their roles.

Advanced notifications

Configurable reminders and notifications help keep employees on track by alerting them to upcoming deadlines, overdue tasks, or time-tracking irregularities. These notifications can be tailored to individual preferences so that they are helpful rather than intrusive.

For managers, notifications can provide real-time updates on project status, helping them stay informed and make timely decisions.

Multilingual support

Multilingual support makes the software accessible to users in different regions, enhancing usability and ensuring that language barriers do not hinder productivity. This feature can include translated interfaces, localized date and time formats, and support documentation in various languages.

At the end of the day, you, as a manager, need to know where your team’s time is being spent and how it can be best utilized for the betterment of your organization. Work-from-home time tracking reports can help you pinpoint the tasks that are taking up too much of your team’s time so you can take steps to make them more efficient or delegate them to other members of the team.

That’s why tracking the productivity rate should be an essential practice for every employer, as it helps you to easily track productivity and ensure that your team is meeting deadlines and staying on task.

There are many ways that you can measure your performance as well, including:

• Tracking the number of hours worked
• Monitoring the number of tasks completed
• Assessing the quality of your work

However, the best way is to use productivity tracking software. All this can be automated with the help of Flowace. The software will automatically start counting how many minutes you were productive each day, calculate your total productivity at the end of each week, and send it directly to your system for instant viewing and management.