It’s said that the only thing we can’t get back in life is time, so you best use it wisely. For businesses in the services industry, it is particularly important to have a firm grip on the time —i.e. billable hours— their team spends making things happen. That’s where employee time tracking softwarecomes in handy—it’s a practical tool to help easily track the time spent on individual tasks or entire projects within a business.
In this article, we’ll outline the benefits that time tracking provides and share our top three recommended software apps to help your business track time more easily.
The benefits of employee time tracking software
Since the software’s designed to monitor your team’s hours, it’s especially useful for team managers or project managers to keep track of the time spent on client projects quickly and simply, rather than trying to manually manage this yourself. In fact, 25% of employers are already using a time tracking application with their employees. So, let’s look at five key benefits of using these tools.
1. Provides an overview of time spent on tasks
The fundamental benefit of time tracking is oversight of how and where your team spends their time. This isn’t necessarily about distrust or micromanaging, but instead helping to manage the team’s time more efficiently. It saves you time on physically checking in on your team and you can track your employees’ time.
2. Motivates employees to use their time efficiently
Just as time tracking helps managers to assess how their team spends their time, it is also a motivator for the team to utilise their time and resources efficiently and effectively at work. Given they know their time is visible, it can be a simple way to encourage discipline at work and help your employees accurately divide up their time to focus on different tasks.
3. Recognises the time it takes to complete different tasks
Most project managers launch a project by estimating the time and resources required to carry out the job. If you have a running record of the time your team has spent on varying projects, it makes life easier to more accurately generate time estimates, and therefore cost.
4. Accurately bills your clients for the work done
Having a precise and expansive overview of projects ultimately benefits your business’ bottom line (and saves headaches), since you can accurately bill clients for time worked. This means you don’t have to add additional hours you didn’t charge for—you don’t want to have an awkward conversation where you ask a client to pay more than originally agreed upon. This way you’ll have evidence on hand to reassure clients they are being billed fairly.
5. Calculates your pricing more precisely
Lastly, as any business naturally evolves and grows, you will need to assess and optimise your pricing to ensure you’re as profitable as possible. By having hard data on the time required for different projects, you can more easily calculate and adjust your costing, and tally this alongside other factors such as business expenses to get a clear picture of where your business stands financially.
Recommended time-tracking software for remote employees
This brings us to the three recommended time tracking apps for managing your team’s hours. Each software app has been selected based on a specific set of criteria, including the number of user reviews and the user rating. The apps are listed in order of the highest overall user rating in Capterra. You can find the detailed methodology at the bottom of this page.*
1.
Rating: 4.7/5
Features: 4.6/5
Ease of use: 4.4/5
Free version: Free forever account
Cost to upgrade: £4.07 per user per month, billed annually.
About ClickUp:
ClickUp is a productivity app to help you keep everything work-related organised in one place for your team to access. With productivity at its core, it helps businesses plan their team’s day and provides oversight of all tasks. It functions on both desktop and mobile, and has a range of features to help you organise your team’s time, such as:
- Resource management
- Automatic time capture
- Offline time tracking
- Billable & non-billable hours
- Timesheet management.
2.
Rating: 4.5/5
Features: 4.2/5
Ease of use: 4.5/5
Free version: 30-day free trial
Cost to upgrade: £11 per month for the Lite plan.
About Freshbooks:
Freshbooks is a time-tracking and scheduling app allowing you to easily manage your team’s time, wherever they’re working from. Employee hours are viewable and you can see an overview of what employees are working on, as well as where they’re working thanks to its GPS tracker, which is aimed at managing mobile or remote teams. Its features include:
- Automated scheduling
- Offline time tracking
- Mobile time tracking
- Overtime calculation
- Timesheet management.
3.
Rating: 4.2/5
Features: 4.2/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Free version: Free plan
Cost to upgrade: US$9.80 per user per month for the Professional plan, try it for 6-months free.
About Wrike:
Wrike is a work management and collaboration app that allows you to manage workflows and track time, as well as monitor project progress. Managers can create custom workflows for teams so they can track the status of each employees’ progress on particular projects, giving you total visibility of tasks as well as the ability to streamline this. The app works across both desktop and mobile, and includes the following features:
- Resource management
- Mobile time tracking
- Task management
- Status tracking
- Annual leave tracking.
Learn more about time tracking software
By using time tracking software, you’ll have a better and data-backed understanding of employee time and progress across different tasks.
*Methodology
- We reviewed Capterra’s directory of time tracking software, which produced a list of 484 tools (research conducted on 20th April 2020).
- Out of these products, we narrowed the list to those that had an overall rating of 4/5 stars, which reduced the list to 286 tools.
- We then cut the list to include only the most reviewed apps and analysed the written reviews. This action took the list down to 5 tools (with 1,500 real-user reviews.)
- The tools had an established market in the United Kingdom.
- Finally, we evaluated the number of monthly searches being carried out for each tool. To assess this, we use keyword research software to narrow the list.
- This produced the final three tools in the list.
NOTE: The content in this piece that provides opinions and points of view expressed by users does not represent the views of Capterra.