On the one hand, perceiving time spent by your teammates working as a resource is inhumane. On the other hand, the amounts of money lost in translation of timesheets across the U.S. annually is “impressive,” to say the least. A study was done by Affinity Live, showing that inefficacies are costing the U.S. economy over 7.4 billion dollars daily. And there’s always that part of each of us that felt the lack of time, stress from forced haste, the pressure of deadlines. Efficient time tracking solves all those issues. It allows PMs to follow the time more carefully, executives to plan everything in advance, and every employee not to be dispersed on many tasks or turn into Superman and redo everything at once.
The Overseer Not the Jailer
There are several basic types of time trackers out there.
- Those where you must remember everything you did and report it yourself (pretty much like a notepad on the fridge). These trackers allow users to track their own efficiency and workload, which reflects poorly on general reports and resource management.
- Those that monitor your every move. The trackers literally monitor the change of pages and tabs, keyboard usage, and movement of the computer mouse (a lot like a prison guard). These apps can result in additional stress for employees and still do not provide 100% accuracy for the reports.
- The third kind is the worst of them all. It requires the repetitive manual input of the tasks before the start and manual input after finishing the task—every task, I might add. This is a task on its own, and it adds at least 40 minutes to your daily routine.
And now we’re talking strictly time tracking, not project management or PPM-related apps. The only way to avoid the guesstimations, inaccurate data input, and all kinds of complications when reporting overall teams’ efficiency is aggregating information on the job done and the time spent straight from the source. Aggregation of information from various project management solutions allows management to optimize and correctly distribute such an important resource as the employee’s working time. This means that the number of tools your organization uses doesn’t matter. And the amount of time that each employee will spend on tracking his/her own time won’t increase.
PPM Express Time: a Seamless, Wholesome Time Tracker
Automation of time accounting and analysis has several tangible benefits:
- Accounting of actual working hours
- Monitoring the performance of freelance and remote teams
- Assessment of workload
- Real performance and productivity evaluation
But how do you automate the work of already-adopted digital time tracking apps? With PPM Express Time, you can account for every action taken by each separate document, each meeting, conference call, and task by any of the employees with access to it. PPM Express Time is a service that makes individual time reporting easier than ever. At the same time, it is making the overall productivity report more accurate. And the whole thing is completely automated.
Every user can connect all services into one concise “audit trail” of his/her working days. Let’s say your developers go with JIRA, you outsource team or subcontractors use Trello, and your accounting and management went with Microsoft Planner. All your mailing and event scheduling goes on in good old Office 365. Your employee doesn’t have to duplicate tasks in every system used across the company. They don’t have to remember or manually record all the tasks started and finished in each app and somehow manage to combine them into one concise time report weekly, if not daily.
With PPM Express Time, your PM and HR get a complete overview of data neatly collected from all the tools that all the divisions of your company use. PPM Express Time will track the user’s “working trail” in all these systems and offer one distinctive and personalized timesheet to the user. The user can edit and add to it, if necessary. With an additional bonus of user privacy, user is the one who decides if the “record” stays or goes. No data is automatically stored.
Save Money While Saving Time
An independent survey of 1,000 employees found that 1 in 2 employees has added between 15 and 60 minutes to their timesheets. A few minutes here and there might seem harmless enough, but that time adds up. If half of the employees added just 15 minutes to their timesheets each week, it would cost business owners more than $11 billion each year. The survey of 924 businesses that use time-tracking tools saves, on average, 6% on payroll costs, increases the billable time by an average of 11%, and shaves over 3 hours off of the weekly time-tracking effort. PPM Express Time not only makes it extremely easy for employees to track accurate working hours, eliminating “guesstimations,” but it also discourages employee time theft—a common occurrence that cost U.S. business owners billions each year.
Saving money while tracking your working time correctly works both ways. A recent article based on an independent study surveyed 500 workers across the United States and found that each worker lost about $50,000 per year in revenue by failing to track time spent corresponding with clients and with others involved in work projects. People will almost always underestimate the amount of time needed or spent on a personal task. This means that you’re probably cutting yourself short when it comes to the “cost of your time.” All you must do is track time differently. For example, let’s say Dave had four meetings (15 minutes, 2 x 30 minutes, 1 x 60 minutes) on Monday; he also completed two tasks from Outlook, closed two project tasks in VSTS, and marked one task complete in Trello. The system will create nine records in the time tracker. Dave can accept, delete, or adjust the duration of each record at his discretion. The main benefit that sets PPM Express Time apart of every other solution on the market of the classic approach to time reporting is the ability of the user to leave the memorizing and manual data input to the app.