Picture this.
You’re managing a project. A deadline is screaming bright red on your project management dashboard. You’re frustrated with contractors who appear to be struggling with allocating time in a reliable way. A few of them fail to track time accurately. The cost of missed deadlines and milestones is keeping you up at night. And you are wondering what it is you can do to address the issue.
Is this you? You’re not alone and the solution is just at your fingertips.
What you need to do is look at your time tracking strategies. Easier said than done? To help you out, we have put together the top 7 best practice tips for accurate time tracking. They will put you on the road to becoming a Master Time Tracking Supervisor.
1. Make a point of entering manual timesheets on a daily basis, rather than on a weekly basis. Replace guesstimates with rock-solid data.
2. Also track non-billable hours. You won’t be able to invoice them to your customers, but they give you an idea of how much time you need to allow for tasks such as email, research, travel, etc.
Make sure your estimate non-billable time is spot-on. Your customers may not pay for it, but you will have to. Allowing for non-billable time provides an important piece of the puzzle of how financially feasible the project is.
3. Make a habit of checking time tracking reports regularly. They contain a treasure chest of information. Is the project within budget? Will it finish on time? Can we intervene if a project appears to go off-road in the time tracking department?
If you don’t know where to start reading Time Reports, contact our support team, and they will show you which reports may be useful. They may even customize reports so they work better for you.
4. Don’t forget to label your tasks (client/project/task/category, etc.) at the time of tracking. It’s like searching through your freezer for tomorrow’s dinner. If it doesn’t have an accurate label, you won’t remember what it was three weeks down the track.
5. Keep the time tracking and data-entry as simple as possible. Time tracking needs to be a quick and easy job. After all, if it’s complicated and fussy, it will be skipped over and as a result…inaccurate.
6. Talk to the team why time tracking is important. You will get a lot more compliance and buy-in if people understand why they need to add another task on their already overloaded to-do list. Make sure the team understands that accuracy is more important than speed.
7. Have clear guidelines on what does and does not need to be tracked. Do you need to stop tracking for a bathroom trip? Can an entry be edited later down the track? What happens if a team member fails to (accurately) track time?
We all know that project timelines and accurate estimates are part of the foundations for an optimal workflow and productivity in the business.
Using time tracking and project management tools like ProWorkflow help smoothen the entire process. No more sleepless nights over missed deadlines and failing budgets. Improved business performance, however, may well be the best part.
Share these tips with your team. Have a discussion around them. They can even become a template for your business’ own best practice guidelines.
ProWorkflow makes it super-easy to track time in the way that suits you. Track billable and unbillable hours to help you nail budget estimates. Use the new Time Reports to help you unlock all the secrets you never knew could help you streamline your project management. Once you have identified a pattern, it becomes a breeze to efficiently run tasks with our templates feature. That’s a lot of time and money saved right there. From now on, nothing slips through the cracks.
Trial ProWorkflow for free today!
