Timekeeping

Timekeeping Explained

Timekeeping is a key process that benefits company management, client billing, and employee invoicing and ensures companies and enterprises comply with legal rules and regulations.

Companies, freelancers, or any type of commercial enterprise use timekeeping methods to track employee work hours or personal work hours both in the office and remotely. Hourly employees track their work hours for accurate payroll and overtime, while managers use the data from the employee timesheets for internal management processes, such as accurate client billing and adequate workload distribution.

With the advancement in technology, timekeeping evolved, and many companies replaced the old methods for measuring work hours, such as punch cards, mechanical clocks, and paper timesheets, with digital timesheets or timekeeping software.

The Advantages of Using Timekeeping Software

Timekeeping software automates and makes the timekeeping process easier, allowing managers to track employee activities and create detailed reports regarding timesheet data, activity logs, and so much more. Below is a list of the main advantages of using timekeeping software.

Optimized Workflow

By tracking their work hours, employees are aware of how they spend each hour at work and familiarize themselves with their time expenses. As a result, employees are likely to become more vigilant and spend their working time more mindfully across project tasks.

Managers, on the other hand, learn about the difficulty of the tasks employees spend time on and can adequately distribute the workload to enhance the work dynamics.

Transparency, Project Tracking, and Planning

Employees record their work hours data, and managers create project tracking reports by summarizing the timekeeping data from their employees. Managers later revisit these reports to determine which tasks took up the most and the least amount of time and how the employees handled these tasks. This data helps them set project ETAs and plan the billing for recurring types of projects.

Accurate Client Billing

Companies that charge their clients with an hourly billing rate rely on timekeeping for accurate payroll. With software timekeeping, companies know the exact number of work hours they’ve put towards a project and invoice their clients with an accurate timesheet report. Subsequently, timekeeping eliminates client underbilling or overbilling and leads to friendly client/customer relationships.