Okay okay, we get it – no one wants to track time. But with these features, we promise it can be easier.
If you manage people, especially in a services-oriented business, you’ve probably tried everything to get them to track their time. Yet, in many companies, it remains the maddeningly necessary chore that no one will do.
No matter how often you tell people you need them to do it – not just for themselves but for the business – it doesn’t happen. You remind them that failing to do so costs money – you can’t bill for time that wasn’t tracked – they don’t do it. You can cajole, threaten, incentivize, warn, and berate but time slips away, and money is left on the table.
You are not alone. One study found that only 17% of people actively track their time. That’s a lot of unbilled time, which is why so many companies are trying to make this better with technical solutions.
But using an app, spreadsheet, stopwatch, or most online time-tracking tools – though easier than some of the arcane solutions we’ve heard about – are yet another distraction from an already busy workday. So, people still don’t use them.
Built-in for convenience and ease of use
We know time tracking is a huge headache, which is why we made it a part of the work in Moovila.
People are busy. Stopping what they’re doing to dig up an app on their phone, go to a website, or locate a spreadsheet is annoying. Often, tracking time also requires you to remember cost codes, client ID numbers, or specific project names. In Moovila’s tools, that data is simply built into the work.
But the best part is that we put our time-tracking tool right in the line of vision so that when someone is on their way to work, they can’t miss it. This strategy worked for decades in factories and service industries. When you showed up to work at the assembly line, the time clock was in your way. You didn’t have to remember it because it was hard to miss.
When your team members are working from their customized dashboards in our tools, they will come across a time tracking button on their way to accepting a task. They will see it again when they check on the status of a task, scan tasks for new information, or chat team members who are working with them.
A one button time clock
Our time clock is also super easy to use: Touch a button and a clock pops up and starts logging time. Since this is happening within a task associated with a project, all the project and client information are automatically tracked, too. If you use cost codes to track work, you can choose the right one from a drop-down menu right here.
Everything – your name, the time you started the task, how much time you spent on it, the project, the task, and the cost code – is added to the time log automatically. After you clock in and get to work, a tracker appears at the top of your dashboard indicating that you are logged in and working on a specific task. You can simply clock out by tapping that tracker.
If you forget to hit the time clock when you start work, it’s easy to turn it on after the fact. Just tap that time button and start the clock. Then move the arms of the clock backward to add time.
The time log will indicate that this time entry has been edited, though, so it’s not a smart way for time robbers to pad their hours.
Logging hours after the fact
This time-clock model doesn’t work for everyone, though. People who work in the field or at a client site and those who go through the day touching dozens of projects in small time increments, prefer to add hours in batches at the end of the day or week. So, we made that easy, too.
If you just got out of a meeting, say, and want to log the time you spend in it as billable hours, you could go to your time logs and add an hour – or however long the meeting was – manually. The time log will indicate that this time was added manually by not showing a clocked in or out time.
Or, if you spend every day in meetings and never have time to enter hours, you can sit down with your calendar at the end of the week and add your hours right into your timesheet.
The timesheet view brings up the entire week at once, showing you all the projects you’re working on and the hours you’ve already logged. Just enter the meetings you endured into the line associated with the projects and it will handle the rest.
This is quick and easy to do at the end of the day, at the end of the week, or when timecards are due.
Approving other people’s time
If you manage people and bill their time back to clients, Perfect Project will let you easily view the time sheets for all clients and all contributors for whatever time periods you want to view. This makes it easy to see if people are spending too much, or too little, time working for a client and to add that time to your invoices. This can be especially helpful if you sell time blocks as a service and need to track cost overages.
Just choose a date range to see how much time has been spent on each project, who worked on them, and for how long. It breaks people’s hours into billable and non-billable to make tracking the time you are spending for each client so easy you can do it daily.
We have made it so easy to manage time tracking, right from where people work, that everyone will quickly forget how big of a headache this once was and track all their time. And when everyone does that, you can stop badgering and start billing.
Ready to stop leaving all that unbilled-for money on the table? Take Moovila’s intelligent work planning tools for a spin and see how they can help you work better. Book a demo today.
