Is time Slipping Through Your Fingers (and Your Revenues)?
Courtesy of the blog at Paymo, a time-tracking software application, I came across the Better Projects blog, which lists important reasons to do track time on projects and deliverables. One recent post, Good reasons to do time tracking, you’ll find this point
There are many reasons that time tracking is important. In order to make strategic decisions, you need data. The only place to get data that can be aggregated is to have the detail that rolls up. The types of decisions that have been made based on the time tracking data I’ve collected over the years include:
* Staffing - Several people avoided layoffs because I could show exactly what they were working on and how long they spent doing it. We also could show that we needed more people in order to do additional projects in the time frame management required it.
* Project delivery dates - Because we had good historical data on actual times vs. estimates, our estimates were given more credibility by management. Instead of management insisting on an unreasonable delivery date, they accepted ours.
* Planning when new projects could be started - When management saw that staff was fully loaded for the next few months, they reprioritized their projects to fit the staffing schedule.
I would add one point to the above: without tracking time, in a service-based business you may not have accurate financial projections and budgets.
Service-based businesses that essentially sell time (law firms, consultants, engineers, marketing, software development, Web design firms, etc.) need to be aware of time spent on offerings on a unit basis. Otherwise, you’ll never understand your true cost structure. What’s more, you won’t have a real handle on the upper limit of your revenue growth or what it will take to grow.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:51 am
We started using Pacific Timesheet (http://www.pacifictimesheet.com) last year, and it has exceeded our demands. We use it mainly for attendance and payroll time tracking, but some groups use it for light project time tracking, too. It saves us significant time to have one time tracking software for the entire organization.
Regards,
Donna Chu
April 8th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
One of our former office space clients, is working in the time management field and has created a web based program, The Log Book, for time reporting. Check it out here (in Swedish): http://www.happybits.se/
There are many advantages of having “control” of the time. Translated freely from his site:
- Take control over the business and the activities. Time (external and internal), resources, project, customers.
- Evaluate your business. Search and find the projects and customers that are profitable.
- Your customers get detailed reports on the invoices, with all work listed.
Time is money!
April 8th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Martin, I’ll take your word for it! I need to brush up on my Swedish!
Anita