Timesheets are not a glamorous subject to talk about, but they do play an important role in many organisations.
As a manager, understanding how you can use timesheets to benefit your business will help you make decisions that can affect the profitability and productivity of your company.
1. Keep track of employee hours
Timesheets such as PM3Time are a great way to keep track of your employees’ hours and productivity. You can use timesheets for projects, business as usual and non-project time, e.g. administration, and meetings. They can also be used for project costing and cross-charging time to other departments or organisations.
Timesheets are an essential tool for most businesses, as they allow you to understand where your staff is spending their time. Timesheets can also benefit employees by highlighting to managers that their workload is too high.
Timesheets also make it easy for businesses to calculate how much they should be paying their contractors on a weekly or monthly basis based on the work that each contractor has done.
2. Monitor Employee Productivity
Timesheet systems enable you to measure the time taken to complete tasks. This will help you identify tasks that are ‘taking too much time’ so you can look at improving these tasks and/ or processes. This can help improve efficiency in your business. If you can’t measure a task, you don’t know whether it is inefficient and needs to be improved. Improving inefficient tasks can boost an organisation’s productivity.
3. Estimate Future Work More Accurately
If you have a set of project tasks to be completed, you need to estimate how long these tasks will take. Having a history of tasks that are similar in a timesheet system will enable you to estimate project tasks more accurately.
4. Use Time Tracking to Identify Work Trends across the Business
Time tracking is a great way to identify trends in work across the business. It can help you understand where you might need to make adjustments or improvements, and it can also help you identify areas of growth, focus and expansion.
5. Cross Charge Costs to Departments Accurately
Organisations that don’t use a timesheet system will often use spreadsheets instead. Because there is no approval mechanism built in and spreadsheets are so flexible, you can get a situation where somebody is booking time to the wrong project or to the wrong task. With a timesheet system like PM3time, you can only book time to projects and tasks you are allowed to, and the approval workflow ensures that the line manager approves or rejects timesheets. This ensures that time is booked to the right projects and any cross charge is accurate.
Summary
Timesheets can seem uninteresting, but they can deliver real benefits to organisations. They can help identify overloaded employees and improve your processes. If you are cross-charging to other departments then having the data and charge rates in timesheets is essential for accuracy and also provides an audit trail.
Beautiful timesheet software
Simply put, PM3Time is an easy-to-use time, cost and expense management system that just works. It provides clear, integrated, and ‘real time’ visibility of how your employees and contractors are spending their time, whether that be on projects or non-billable work.
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