Technology

5 Features You Should Look for in a Time-Tracking Software

5 Features You Should Look for in a Time-Tracking Software

With a time-tracking solution, you can gain insight into your employees’ productivity and success by monitoring their work hours against tasks, projects, and clients. This data allows employers to make informed decisions that will help increase efficiency in the workplace.

Finding the best time-tracking tool for you today can be quite difficult, with so many different software solutions available.

But don’t worry! 

In this article, we will discuss the 5 most critical features you must consider when choosing time-tracking and employee-monitoring software. We will also discuss how utilizing time tracking can benefit your business. But, let us first see what time-tracking software is.

What is Time Tracking Software?

A time tracking software accurately captures the effort and progress of any employee, consultant, or freelancer associated with a company. 

As opposed to manual time entries in timesheet software such as MS Excel, a time-tracking solution records data seamlessly and automatically.

Not only does a time tracker app log your total working hours, but it also carefully records:

  • How much time is spent on individual projects
  • How long has a team member been inactive
  • How much work you accomplished in a week/month

Time-tracking software can help you to streamline the generation of analytical reports, create payroll, and accurately assess each employee’s productivity.

5 Key Features of a Time-Tracking Software

1. Time Tracking & Employee Monitoring

With time tracking, you can precisely measure the number of hours your employees spend on individual tasks throughout their workday. 

In addition to monitoring completed tasks, the application must also provide data in visual representations such as graphs for simplified comprehension.

2. Timesheets

A timesheet calculates the hours your employees work and how much they should be paid in terms of billable hours.

With today’s applications, timesheets can be automatically generated in standard templates and delivered to your inbox regularly as a CSV or DOC file. 

Several time tracking applications offer automated payrolls for billable hours to pay consultants or employees automatically via whatever payment method they prefer.

3. Analytics & Reports

With time-tracking applications, employers can generate reports detailing the workload of each individual employee. 

These reports could consist of:

  • Summary of work done: provides comprehensive data regarding active worker hours and breaks over any given day, week, or month.
  • Project/task-specific report: displays every individual’s commitment to a certain project or assignment.
  • Activity report: outlines the tasks and websites accessed by your employees to give you an up-to-date overview of what they’ve been working on.

4. Project Management

Project management allows you to successfully complete any assignment as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, while simultaneously maintaining the required level of quality. 

Usually, a time-tracking app is integrated into larger project management software for even better performance. 

Nowadays, time-tracking software often comes equipped with the necessary project management and task management features that can effectively support small projects.

5. Integrations

Integrating external software capabilities has become a necessity when choosing efficient time-tracking software.

Utilizing an integrated system will make managing projects significantly simpler. It will also permit you to quickly implement long-term and short-term alterations that maximize your performance.

5 Benefits of Time-Tracking 

In addition to the obvious advantage of understanding how long your employees have been working, utilizing a time-tracking application can provide numerous other benefits. Here are five reasons why you and your company should consider using one.

1. Increased Focus

By tracking their time, your employees can stay laser-focused on one task at a time. This not only increases productivity but also reduces the distraction that comes with multitasking. 

As a result, your employees can:

  • Intensify their focus on projects and tasks 
  • Work faster
  • Work more effectively and efficiently 

2. Prevents Burnout

Several factors can cause workplace burnout, including:

  • Workload fluctuations
  • Regular overtime
  • Excess capacity
  • No downtime

Having employees log their time encourages them to be mindful of how they are spending it.

3. Tracks Hidden Tasks

On a daily basis, you may find yourself juggling tasks that are not directly related to your project goals but still require significant amounts of your time. These are known as hidden tasks.

Taking note of the time spent on tasks can help you to accurately account for every moment and plan accordingly for your project timeline. 

4. Helps Prioritize Better

By monitoring their activities and the amount of time allocated to complete them, your employees can adjust their daily routine to give more attention to those tasks that demand greater effort at the start of their day.

5. Reduces Project Costs

Utilizing time-tracking techniques allows you to identify how long each phase of your project development lifecycle requires. It helps you construct an estimated timeline for the entire project.

If you’ve got the timeline for your project at hand, you can dedicate yourself to searching for cost-effective resources.

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