The challenges of time recording and time tracking

This article aims to remind you of the challenges of time tracking so that you can choose the tool that will suit you best. In other words, this article is your checklist of things you need to keep in mind when thinking about this approach and choosing your time tracking tool.

Time tracking is a key topic for companies. For professional services entities such as consulting firms, IT integrators, IT Services, Managed Services — the challenges are multiple.

Multiple factors and situations make time tracking a key issue. These factors are multiple: generalized teleworking, the war for talent and a tight labor market, but also factors such as teams positioned on multiple projects, sometimes belonging to different departments or outsourced.

The subject even goes beyond time tracking itself, we will then talk about "time management" which will in most cases be related to different functions of the company such as: (1) resource management, the objective will be to keep teams productive and engaged; (2) financial monitoring with the notions of selling price, cost and margin, or (3) invoicing, which is a commercial performance issue. Time tracking touches on all these subjects.

Financial Monitoring

The financial performance of projects is a key issue. Time monitoring will have to be part of a management control and project accounting logic. Stafiz stands out in particular insofar as it provides a forward-looking vision and takes charge of the financial monitoring of your different project sales methods. Explanations: 

Fixed-price projects 

Since you are selling a project by the envelope, it will be a question of checking that you do not exceed the budget you had set for yourself. To do this, you will have to draw up a provisional budget and respect it. Time monitoring will then be essential and the tool will have to integrate the Average Daily Rate (ADR) and Average Daily Costs (ADC) in order to be able to track variances.

Stafiz stands out for its completeness and forecasting. You can track all your costs, including internal costs, subcontracting, products, expenses and so on. By taking into account what has been planned and what has been achieved (thanks to simplified time tracking), Stafiz allows you to see your projects through to completion. All project tracking indicators are automatically recalculated with each action on the platform. The result? You identify when deviations will occur and why. What's more, you're alerted before they happen.

Finally, if you want to follow your projects even more faithfully, integrate the pre-sales phase into the costs. Stafiz integrates a CRM module focused on opportunity management to manage this pre-sales. If you already have a CRM, Stafiz's comprehensive API will be your ally.

Projects under management

For this type of project, the risk comes from the costs not re-invoiced but also from the discounts that may be granted to the client in the event of disagreement or dissatisfaction with the work delivered. Stafiz guarantees you a complete monitoring of these elements with a granularity and various time tracking modes (% of day, day, hour, etc.). The workflows for validating Activity Reports (CRA) are also configurable.

To learn more, refer to our article on how to calculate the profitability of a project.

User Adoption and Productivity

Time tracking is a delicate subject and can be interpreted as policing by your employees. It is important to support the fact that this is a process of global improvement and of each individual: you cannot improve what you do not measure. You also don't want employees to spend too much time on time entry. So timesheets need to be simple and intuitive to fill out. The health of your employer brand is at stake.

Choosing a Time and Activity management software 

Billing

There are many issues surrounding invoicing:

First of all, you need to satisfy your stakeholders and retain them, including your external resources, your freelancers. To do this, invoicing must be fast, accurate and reliable, otherwise you risk offending your partners. An error on an invoice is equivalent to an error on a pay slip of your employees.

To do this, your time tracking software will need to include features that allow you to do these tasks quickly: time entry and validation.

Stafiz offers simple and fast entry, time entry reminders but also the transformation of planning into completed time to speed up the process. For time-spent projects — the Activity Reports (CRA) for IT services companies/IT Services —validation workflows are fully configurable and allow a considerable reduction in validation time.

The other key issue is the profitability of your business. The shorter your billing cycle, the better. You must therefore monitor at a glance your production carried out but not invoiced.

In Stafiz, invoicing can also be triggered automatically on the basis of deadlines or completed times. Contact us to find out more.

Value for money

Beyond doing good resource planning with the module resource planning of Stafiz, it is necessary to be able to measure what is happening in reality in order to monitor any deviations and deviations.

It sometimes happens that projects are well planned but for various reasons they do not take place or are carried out in a staggered manner. You don't know what your employees are doing. Time tracking allows you to have a real view of the occupancy of your teams. In addition to measuring the time spent, you will also want to track the nature of the projects carried out by your teams, especially in order to maximize the time spent on billable projects. utilization rate Excluded leave (billable utilization rate) or billable utilization rate .

By relying on time monitoring and the associated financial impacts, resource optimization will also require a detailed knowledge of your talents, their skills and appetites. Your goal will be to: Positioning the right people, neither too competent (because they are more expensive), nor not enough (because the quality of the work will not be at the expected level), motivated by the mission/task and available.

You will then be able to make decisions to reorganize the resource planning before the deviations actually occur. You will then have several options such as: 

• Replace a senior employee with two juniors for the same level of rendering
• Renegotiate with the client

In order to get to know your teams, their strengths and weaknesses, you will need to monitor the forecast reporting during projects but also after projects. You will then understand which teams work best, which employees are the most efficient, which tasks/phases are the most efficient. All this will help you to better cost your projects and select your resources.

Global company monitoring

The last major challenge of time tracking is the monitoring of projects and the management of your company.

Indeed, all the time tracking data collected can then be consolidated in order to be analyzed.

Stafiz offers you this analysis capacity in a fixed way every month, for example.

You will then have a macro vision of your business: 

• Revenues from your different types of projects (forafit, management etc.)

• Internal and external costs

Also equipped with advanced project accounting functions, Stafiz manages different modes of turnover recognition to allow you to analyze your activity.

The time, and therefore costs, spent on internal (and non-billable) projects will also be found here, which will reduce the bottom line.

Time tracking is related to different aspects of your business, which may or may not be considered depending on your goals. To go further, our article comparing time management tools might interest you.