Managing any project is no easy feat, not to mention when that “project” is an entire company. The larger a company is, the harder it gets to track progress and efficiency. The difficulty of tracking a task ultimately depends on how many variables are there to observe and analyze. These variables are the number of employees, the number of sub-tasks, the amount of result data for analysis, and similar. For humans, things can get out of hand quite quickly when it comes to a higher number of variables. Needless to say, the technology of today is there to help make such tasks more efficient.
For the task of tracking the progress of the operations that your employees partake in, the best answer is to use a time tracking software. Such software enables you to collect and analyze important data without the effort of compiling it yourself. What you get is data on hours spent on a task, project, client, website, app – or pretty much whatever you require. Once such data is acquired, it’s much easier to track efficiency and progress and act on bettering it. But – what should you look for in such software for your business? In this article, you will be able to find all the important features that you need when it comes to time tracking software.
Time tracking
Well, as the name of the software suggests, time tracking is the most essential feature here. It is incredibly important, as it gives you an overview of time spent on various activities. This goes for different tasks, apps, clients, but also idle time. You can also try a time tracker with screenshots as it allows you to gain further insight into the time spent on a computer for each employee. The time range can be modified for activity tracking, so you can analyze data daily, weekly, monthly – or whatever way you prefer. Ultimately, with this tool, you will be able to understand every individual’s contributions and performance way better than before.
Compiled timesheets
Qualitative data is good and all, but you need a quantitative and clear overview of the situation as well. This is where compiled timesheets come to help. By having a compiled timesheet of the time that your employees spend on a daily basis, you will acquire many benefits. Most importantly, you will have easily quantifiable data on how much time each employee spends on a given task. This can help with evaluating progress and efficiency, but it can also help with handling payments. More on payrolls in relation to tracking software later though! Finally, you can use these automatically generated timesheets to predict any upcoming project costs by comparison.
Various analytics and reports
No matter whether we’re talking about the summary of the work done per day or a project-specific report – these are incredibly useful. A good time tracking software will give you the possibility of such auto-generated reports and overall analytics.
The most helpful information that you can gather out of such reports is performance measurement. Additionally, by looking into how much time is spent on projects and tasks, you will gain insight into the need for recruitment. Sometimes, it’s not easy to determine whether you’re understaffed. If you have relevant data to go through though, this task gets a lot easier.
Project management tools
A good time tracking software is going to be able to connect to a more complex project management software. That aside, most of the time tracking software actually is equipped with basic project management tools on its own.
That being said, you can use such software to assign certain tasks based on all the info that you’ve gathered from the reports and timesheets. You can also use these tools to set deadlines, which is much easier when you have empirical data to use for this purpose. All in all – time tracking software makes sure that you make more reliable predictions about various parameters and put them to good use.
Tools for managing payrolls
Finally, time tracking software is a great tool for accurately managing payrolls faster than ever before. Such software comes with a payroll management feature that will help you streamline the entire process. You have all the data about the working hours at hand, hence, managing payrolls doesn’t need to be done manually with the right software.
Finally, if you are going to invest in time tracking software, it’s important that you invest in something that is truly worth your time. If you end up with something that doesn’t fit your needs, you will only end up with new complications rather than solving the old ones. All of that being said, after reading this article, you are now ready to track down the perfect tracking software. Focus on all the features that you’ve read about and assess your priorities accordingly. If you do all that, without a doubt, you will end up with time tracking software that is going to make your life way easier.
