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Time tracking is often misunderstood and excused as being unnecessary. Simply put, many just don’t think tracking time is worth their time, especially if their business is already profitable. Many profitable businesses that we’ve interviewed, however, have found even more success after adding time tracking to their day-to-day workflow. Based on their stories, here are three ways that time tracking can help you work less and bill more.
Know when to stop working
Our time is our most precious, non-renewable resource. When we track our time, we learn more about where it’s going. That can mean we find areas where we’ve been wasting our time, or areas we haven’t spent enough time. Chances are, however, that most of us are working too much and need help or justification to work less.
Time tracking quantifies our daily efforts. It gives us a number that puts our days, weeks, months, and years into perspective. It’s a liberating experience to arrive at the end of your day or week and have the data tell you that you’ve billed enough time. And, that you can stop working now.
Increase billable hours up to 30%
Most time tracking tools feature timers that track your time for you. With very little effort you can get far more accurate results than trying to track time in your head, on paper, or using Excel spreadsheets. This additional accuracy can result in up to a 30% increase in hours tracked. We’ve seen this happen with many of our own customers.
With this increase, any time tracking software will pay for itself. And because you’ll be billing more without actually working more, you have the option to work less, or, to focus more time on the projects that interest you.
Speed up client invoicing and reporting
When you bill clients for a service, whether that be hourly or flat rate billing, they will often times ask for an accounting of how their money is being spent. Putting together reports to justify your time requires a lot of work, from gathering the data to making it presentable.
Time tracking tools, especially those with good reporting features, will reduce this job down to a few seconds. Because the time has already been tracked, the report is just a few clicks away. This one benefit alone can save you several hours a month that would typically be spent creating client invoices and reports.
