How time tracking can be promoted in the company

What type of time tracker do you belong to? Immediate tracker, after-work tracker or just before the weekend tracker? If you or the people in your company belong to the second or even third category, in this article I would like to show you the consequences of frivolous time and time tracking – and give you tips on how to improve it.

Sales growth made easy

Turnover is already there, it just needs to be entered. With these words, we would like to support all those people who leave cash behind. Not maliciously, but because of a lack of discipline in time recording. At Vertec, we prefer the term time Time Tracking, because it better describes what this is really about. Time, which means only minutes, hours, days. On the other hand, we have provided service, hopefully with corresponding added value for the customer and thus also for our own company.

Companies that pay by hours are the most seriously affected. Let us quantify the damage in a fictitious invoice. In a company, 30 people enter services that are charged at the end of the month. It has become commonplace that 'hours’ are not entered until after work. We assume that employees tend to underestimate, which means that too little time is entered on the various projects or cases. Every day, 15 minutes are lost per person, which should have been invoiced. That is 7.5 hours a day.

Let us now assume that each hour is charged at an average of 125 euros, on the first day of the week, 937.50 euros have already vanished into thin air. If you calculate it to 220 working days a year, the company gives away around 200,000 euros in turnover. And that for “only” 15 minutes lost. In Switzerland, we calculate an hourly rate of CHF 150, giving away a total of around CHF 250,000.

Problems also with flat-rate services

Less dramatic is the invoice for lump-sum services. At the very least, there is no direct loss of revenue. Incorrect recording of times, however, leads to incorrect measurement values in controlling. If 80 hours have been budgeted and entered and recorded for a project phase, even though 96 hours have been performed, the invoice does not work. In the worst case, however, incorrect project calculations are not detected at all, because the extra effort of employees is simply not visible.

Solutions for better time tracking

Raising awareness

My calculation example is extremely simplistic, but it does impressively show the impact of each individual’s behavior. The more revenue your business generates from hours that are charged for hours, the more it needs to be anchored in everyone’s consciousness.

Shaping Culture

What is the (recording) culture in your company? Ask three colleagues how they enter their services. You might find interesting insights. This culture depends on processes (how should it be?), habits (how have we always done it?) and ease of use (how complicated is it to track time tracking?).

Defining the process

Is there a clearly defined process for entering services internally? In my experience, there are almost always deadlines for when the services of a month have to be recorded, because that is what the invoicing depends on. But there is nothing against streamlining the process a little and defining the time tracking at the end of the working day. The next step would be entering before lunch and after work. The closer the entering is to the service, the more accurate it is. The data becomes even more accurate when the entering takes place live. Vertec has a timer, a type of stopwatch that can be used to start and pause the entering. The feature is also available on mobile devices on Android and iOS.

Changing habits

The timer in Vertec is a good example of a positive habit. If everyone in the company enters their services “live” with the timer, little billable time is “wasted.” But this only works if starting Vertec (or any alternative) is as normal as having coffee in the morning and skipping your inbox. Fully automated time-tracking tools aim to make the habit obsolete. However, I do not know of an example where this works without manual post-processing.

Make time tracking user-friendly

User-friendliness in time tracking is defined by hours, speed and availability. How many clicks are required to complete the entering? Be entering possible without a mouse? In Vertec, time tracking is placed as prominently as possible – on the first page after login. Even the active cursor is then ready to start in time tracking.

Conclusion

Inaccurate time tracking costs millions of dollars in revenue every year. The reasons lie in seeking processes, habits, and ease of use. The key to improvement lies in a shift in mindset and a culture in which accurate, honest entering of services is as normal as coffee at the start of work.