The challenges of time recording and time tracking

Time tracking is a key issue for companies. For professional services companies in particular - consulting firms, IT integrators, IT Services, facilities management - the stakes are manifold.

Many factors and situations make time tracking a key issue. 

These factors are manifold: widespread telecommuting, 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.

In most cases, time management is linked to various corporate functions, such as: (1) resource management, with the aim of keeping teams productive and committed; (2) financial monitoring, with the concepts of sales price, cost and margin; and (3) invoicing, which is a key factor in sales performance. Time tracking touches on all these subjects.

The purpose of this article is to remind you of the issues involved in time tracking, so that you can choose the tool that's right for you. In other words, this article is your check list of things you need to keep in mind when thinking about this approach and choosing your time tracking tool.

Financial monitoring

The financial performance of projects is a key issue. Time tracking must be part of a management control and project accounting logic. Stafiz stands out from the crowd in that it provides a forward-looking vision and handles the financial tracking of your various project sales methods. Here's how it works: 

Fixed-price projects 

Since you're selling a project by the envelope, you'll need to make sure you don't go over budget. To do this, you'll need to draw up a provisional budget and stick to it. Time tracking will then be essential, and the tool will need to integrate Average Daily Rate (ADR) and Average Daily Cost (ADC) variables, so as to be able to monitor deviations.

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 keep even closer track of your projects, integrate the pre-sales phase into your costs. Stafiz includes an opportunity management CRM module to manage this pre-sales phase. If you already have a CRM, Stafiz's complete API will be your ally.

On-site projects

For this type of project, the risk comes from unbilled costs, as well as any rebates granted to the customer in the event of disagreement or dissatisfaction with the work delivered. Stafiz guarantees complete tracking of these elements, with various granularity and time tracking modes (% of day, day, hour, etc.). Workflows for validation of Activity Reports can also be configured.

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

User adoption and productivity

Time tracking is a tricky subject, and can be interpreted by your employees as a form of snooping. It's important to emphasize that it's a global improvement process for everyone: you can't improve what you don't measure. You also don't want employees to spend too much time on time entry. That's why you need timesheets that are simple and intuitive to fill in. The health of your employer brand depends on it.

Choosing a Time and Activity management software 

Billing

There are many issues surrounding invoicing:

First and foremost, you need to keep your stakeholders satisfied and loyal, including your external resources, your freelancers. To achieve 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 your employees' payslips.

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

Stafiz offers quick and easy data entry, time entry reminders, and the ability to convert planning into actual time to speed up the process. For time-based projects - Comptes Rendues d'Activité (CRA) for SSII/IT Services - validation workflows are fully configurable, enabling a considerable reduction in validation time.

The other key issue is the profitability of your business. The shorter your billing cycle, the better. That's why you need to keep a close eye on your unbilled production.

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

Optimizing resources

In addition to good resource planning with Stafiz's resource planning module, you need to be able to measure what is happening in reality in order to monitor any deviations.

It sometimes happens that projects are well planned, but for various reasons they don't take place, or are carried out out of schedule. In such cases, you don't know what your employees are doing. Time tracking gives you a real picture of how busy your teams are. In addition to measuring time spent, you'll also want to monitor the nature of the projects carried out by your teams, particularly with a view to maximizing the time spent on billable projects, so you'll need to keep an eye on the utilization rate Leave Excluded (TACE) or billable utilization rate rate.

Based on time tracking and the associated financial impacts, optimizing resources will also require a detailed understanding of your talents, their skills and aptitudes. Your objective will be to positioning the right peopleThey are neither too skilled (because they are more expensive) nor too unskilled (because the quality of the work will not be at the level expected), motivated by the mission/task and available.

You can then make decisions to reorganize 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 output
• Renegotiating with the customer

In order to get to know your teams, their strengths and weaknesses, you'll need to keep an eye on forecast reporting both during and after projects. You'll then understand which teams work best, which employees are most efficient, which tasks/phases perform best. 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 to keep track of projects and manage your business.

All the time tracking data collected can then be consolidated for analysis.

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

This will give you a macro view of your business: 

• Revenue from your different types of project (forafit, régie, etc.)

• Internal and external costs

Equipped with advanced project accounting functions, Stafiz manages different sales recognition modes to help you analyze your business.

Time, and therefore costs, spent on internal (and non-billable) projects will also be included here, reducing the bottom line.

Time tracking is linked to various aspects of your business, which may or may not need to be taken into account, depending on your objectives. To find out more, you may be interested in our article comparing time management tools.