5 Game-Changing Benefits of Time Tracking

When you run an agency, there comes a point where you simply can't get around seamless employee time tracking. And by that I don't just mean checking in and out at the beginning and end of the day. Area-wide time recording means, above all, precise tracking of working time at Activities - and, in fact, all activities, regardless of whether they involve work on customer projects or internal activities.

Of course, such an initiative is initially unpopular with employees, because of the "surveillance state" and so on. Nevertheless, it pays off a hundred times over to do the necessary convincing as a manager and to anchor the measure in the company.

This blog post explains why. Here are 5 good reasons why you should implement seamless time tracking in your company right away:

1. Get to know your time thieves.

First, as an entrepreneur, you need to understand for yourself exactly where your daily work time actually goes. Especially as an agency operator, you often have too many job sites: You manage clients, conduct job interviews, oversee projects, give presentations, write invoices and so on. You're the last one to turn off the lights every day, and on the drive home you wonder where the time actually went.

Not only is it exhausting, it also stunts the growth of your business. Because with so much urgent work, you hardly ever get to the really important things, such as thinking about a better strategy, personal training, etc.

As an entrepreneur you don't have to prove to anyone that you are a hard-working guy. The first step to break out of this mill is time tracking. You need to understand for yourself what activities you actually spend your week on. Identify and eliminate time thieves and focus on the issues that really move your business forward.

2. Put your capacity planning on a solid foundation

The most valuable resource in digital agencies is time. Every employee spends time - working on projects, in meetings or at the coffee machine. For your company, it's crucial that as much of your employees' capacity as possible ends up on an invoice at some point. Because this share of productive work pays for the whole party.

As an entrepreneur, you have to keep an eye on the total capacity of your company and compare it with the expected workload in the medium term. This means that you have to look for and train new staff in good time when it becomes apparent that the workload is too much for the team. The only thing is that the workload often fluctuates greatly in the project business, making it difficult to decide for or against new personnel. And mistakes at this point are costly: what if you hire the new employee and then demand drops?

So you shouldn't rely on gut feelings when planning capacity, but quantify exactly how the organization's available time resources really are. To do this, you need reliable figures, especially on the capacities usually called up by existing customers in a month. And you can only get these figures if employees accurately record their times.

3. Discover the capacity reserves of your company

Before you hire a new employee, you should be really sure that he or she is really needed. Often, a company has unimagined capacity reserves in processes and routines that are actually unproductive.

An example: An agency with ten employees has a team meeting every Monday for two hours. Projected over the year, that's 1,000 working hours that the company is missing for productive work on customer projects. Changing the process to short weekly one-on-ones or a team stand-up would therefore already free up the capacity of a half-day employee.

However, you can only find out where such capacity reserves are hidden if you have created transparency about the time spent in the company. And precise time recording is a prerequisite for this.

4. Incentive for employees

It's human nature: only when a score is written down do players really get involved. If you don't have time tracking in your company, it's like playing gin rummy with grandma without a score sheet: you're communicating to your employees that you don't really care how long it takes them to do their work. And of course, that impacts efficiency across the board. Because if it's not that important to the boss, it's certainly not important to the employees.

Now imagine the energy in your company if every employee knew you were keeping a close eye on their hours. All of a sudden, productivity differences between colleagues would become transparent for everyone. It would be visible to everyone what the expected performance benchmark of the organization actually is. And it would be much clearer for weaker employees what level they would have to reach in order to catch up with the others.

5. More billable time

Time billing based on estimates inevitably leads to you billing too little. Time is lost everywhere: phone calls to the customer are not written down, correction loops fall by the wayside - everything is a guess.

This is great for the customer, of course, because the boundary between billable project work time and included services is fluid and can still be negotiated if necessary. Since you have not tracked the times properly, it will be difficult for you to assert your claims.

An accurate time tracking is simply fairer - for yourself, but also for the customer. Because you can only afford a high quality of service in the long term if you really account for your working hours to the extent required.

Conclusion

Of course, the introduction of comprehensive time recording initially requires a great deal of convincing on the part of a manager. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is worthwhile - indeed, almost unavoidable. No other measure will have such a lasting effect on your own productivity and that of the entire organization.

By the way: Leadtime stands as the ultimate solution for seamless time tracking within your organization. With its innovative features, such as the Leadtime Time Tracker, employees are constantly prompted to record their time, ensuring accurate insights into their tasks, projects, and activities. By linking time bookings to tickets, Leadtime provides a comprehensive overview of the team's workload and progress. Moreover, these time recordings become invaluable data for efficient invoicing processes, streamlining your financial operations. With Leadtime, you can effortlessly track time, gain valuable insights, and optimize your business operations like never before.