Timesheet Management Explained (Benefits, Purposes & Tips)
There’s nothing new about timesheets. For centuries, businesses have implemented them to solve a great variety of problems:
- HR managers use timesheets to calculate payroll.
- Accountants bill clients and create invoices with their help.
- Project managers need timesheets to control schedule and cost overruns.
- And team leaders apply them to monitor employees’ attendance and evaluate work performance results.
Yet that’s not all.
Timesheets serve many more purposes and goals. This guide explains all about them and unveils the secret behind effective timesheet management so you can make out the best of it in your own business.
What Is Timesheet Management?
A timesheet is a record of working hours spent on different tasks. And timesheet management is all about monitoring how employees utilize their timesheets and analyzing their time tracking results.
In the past, timesheets looked like simple weekly schedules drawn or printed on pieces of paper. They required manual manipulation, could be easily damaged or lost and, overall, were quite burdensome to handle.
However, modern timesheets don’t have that much in common with traditional ones.
They are digitalized, multifunctional and largely automated, which makes the timesheet management process super convenient and efficient for every person involved — from regular workers to their managers and supervisors.
Hence, if you aim to make the best out of timesheet management, it makes perfect sense to apply a digital (online) time tracker instead of a paper-based one.
Pros and Cons of Timesheet Management
Timesheets help businesses stay in control of resources. They supply vital information on performance efficiency and assist in detecting time-wasting behaviors and tasks.
Besides, timesheets are essential for complying with overtime laws. They show whenever an employee exceeds the standard workday / workweek duration and thus let you calculate overtime pay and run other payroll tasks in a risk-free and accurate way.
Nevertheless, timesheet management may have a few downsides:
- As a rule of thumb, employees don’t like time tracking — They tend to see it as a pointless and distracting activity that brings no value into their daily professional lives, or even worse — is used by managers to spy on them and search for faults in their performance.
- Indeed, time tracking can become a micromanagement tool — When you apply automated employee monitoring software that takes screenshots of your staff members’ workstations and reports on everything they do throughout the day, you risk lowering team morale and exposing employees to excess stress. Remember that micromanagement pushes people to quit their jobs and look for healthier workplace environments. So, if you abuse employee monitoring, your turnover rate will likely rise.
Though these two disadvantages can seriously harm your business, you can easily prevent them with the right approach to timesheet management — read further to find out all about it.
How Do You Manage Timesheets?
The timesheet management process is straightforward and includes three basic steps:
- Fill in
- Review
- Analyze
Let’s explore them in a bit more detail using online timesheet software, actiTIME, as an example:
Step 1: Fill in
actiTIME timesheets are intuitive and simple to navigate and work with. They have a weekly format and contain plenty of meaningful information that helps employees and their managers to track task progress with ease:
- Time estimates,
- Deadlines,
- Progress status, etc.
Using these timesheets, employees can track hours against specific tasks, attach comments to their time entries, submit leave requests in a split second and quickly access essential work-related information by simply clicking on any task in the list.
actiTIME timesheets support manual data entry. However, you can always track time automatically with actiTIME Timer — a Chrome extension that sits in the top corner of your browser and seamlessly integrates into many handy online tools: GitLab, Jira, Google Docs, etc.
Step 2: Review
actiTIME has the timesheet approval functionality that makes it convenient for managers to review and endorse / reject employees’ weekly time tracking data.
You can easily see which timesheets are ready for approval in the Approve Time-Track interface (it is available to users with special manager permission). There, you can inspect your team members’ time tracking results one by one — click on the link with dates to check out which tasks they worked on during the week and how much time they spent on them.
Besides, the Approve Time-Track Interface allows you to endorse / reject employee timesheets in bulk and see how much leave time each employee took over a workweek. Plus, in case you decide to reject a person’s timesheet, you may explain your reasons for doing so via the time-track rejection comments.
Step 3: Analyze
actiTIME contains a bunch of valuable reports that enable you to take away some important lessons from the collected data and inform decision-making for the better. You can run them to:
- Get an in-depth view of all the time your team members spent on different projects and tasks
- See how much leave time your employees earned and used over a particular period
- Understand how many overtime hours your workers must be compensated for
- Contrast the set task estimates with actual time tracking results
- Monitor project costs and compare them to revenues
- Review comprehensive billing summaries and export this data as invoices
Timesheet data presented in these actiTIME reports play a vital role in many business management processes. Let’s look at the main of them in the next section of the article.
7 Practical Ways to Use Employee Timesheet Data
1. Payroll
It doesn’t matter if you pay employees a fixed sum of money per month or calculate wages on an hourly basis. They are always expected to work a certain amount of time per day, week and month. Timesheet data helps you see whether your staff abides by these contractual work time requirements and then fairly calculate salaries based on the number of hours tracked.
2. Legal compliance
Overtime laws vary from state to state. You need to know which employees are exempt from them and which are not, what standard workweek duration is accepted in your region, what’s your overtime pay rate, etc. And after you get familiar with all the relevant rules and regulations, you need to track the time invested by your team members in work and handle every overtime hour with due care, as required by the law.
Accurate timesheet data is key to error-free overtime pay calculations. It helps you avoid any legal risks and show impeccable compliance with local labor regulations.
3. Attendance and absence management
Daily time tracking is an excellent way to monitor employee attendance. It helps you see whether each team member attends work regularly and whether they invest the necessary amount of time in their job.
Plus, thanks to leave management functionality included in such timesheet software as actiTIME, you can keep track of employees’ time off. Check out this post to find out more about this handy functionality, how it works, and which benefits it provides.
4. Billing and invoicing
Online timesheet tools offer an easy way to track billable time and generate professional-looking invoices. For instance, in actiTIME, you can set preferable billing rates for different types of work, and the system will automatically calculate billable amounts for you based on the number of hours invested in disparate services.
Besides, actiTIME allows you to create invoices in merely a few clicks or export all the collected pre-accounting data to QuickBooks for further processing. Here we described how to make the best out of actiTIME-QuickBooks integration and how it helps to make accounting more efficient.
5. Project tracking
The way you utilize your time and money defines project success to a large degree. Hence, it’s pivotal to assign reasonable deadlines and budgets for different project works. And even more so, it’s crucial to do your best to meet them and avoid any schedule and cost overruns.
Online timesheet tools come in handy in this regard as well. They let you keep staff-related project costs in check, compare the actual use of time against the set time estimates and analyze team performance via comprehensive time tracking reports. And if your timesheet tool includes such helpful features as automatic notifications, real-time reporting dashboards and the Kanban board, managing project progress becomes a breeze.
6. Better time estimation
Knowing how much time was invested in different kinds of tasks, you will be able to arrive at more accurate estimates for similar tasks in the future. So, it’s useful to scrutinize timesheet reports for already completed projects when you plan out the new ones. Time tracking data depicted in them is key to better time estimation and superior control over your project and team resources.
7. Productivity and efficiency management
By showing how much time your employees utilize on tasks, timesheet data helps you detect different time wasters and optimize various business processes.
For instance, if submitted time tracking records for a specific piece of job don’t meet your initial expectations and estimates, you can try to figure out why your team spent too much time on the task. The problem may be in employees’ procrastination, miscommunication, technical issues and other workflow problems. Timesheet data can’t point directly to them, but it gives evidence that the problem exists and indicates that you need to seek improvement.
6 Final Tips for Better Timesheet Management
As you can see, timesheet management serves many purposes and plays a vital role in the improvement of business performance.
Timesheet management is also incredibly easy. But you can improve its results by following some practical rules:
- Communicate the importance of time tracking to your team members — They need to understand what timesheet data is meant for and why it’s vital to fill in timesheets honestly and regularly.
- Encourage employees to fill in timesheets every day — This helps to get error-free time tracking results.
- Use automation — Automatic timers track working hours with exceptional precision and, thus, increase the value of collected timesheet data.
- Set estimates for tasks and track working hours against them — This will better guide your performance analysis and help you improve the planning of future works.
- Don’t base employee appraisal on timesheet results alone — Time tracking is exactly what it sounds like: it’s all about time. It doesn’t capture the quality of employees’ work, the number of mistakes made, etc. So, it’s impossible to evaluate a professional’s performance on timesheet data alone, yet time tracking may provide some additional evidence during the appraisal process.
- Adopt a simple, high-quality timesheet software — A simple software solution is easy to adopt, and it doesn’t require you to invest a ton of time in learning how it works. However, even a simple solution should cover all your time and progress tracking needs. That’s why actiTIME is an excellent option to try out.
Ready to manage employees’ timesheets in an efficient and productive way? Sign up for a free actiTIME trial today and give it a try!
