Time Tracking Software : Top Features To Look Out For

Time is indeed our most important asset in today’s fast-paced world. For businesses employing hundreds or thousands of people, effective time management holds the highest level of importance. It becomes necessary for employers to monitor the time being spent by their employees to ensure high work productivity.

A time tracking software offers a myriad of benefits, making it a must-have for maximizing the overall progress of any business. To be specific, it keeps a track of time being invested by an employee in accomplishing a certain task at hand. This helps in billing clients accurately based on the time and expense reports generated by the software.

But how do you pick the right app or software that best suits your business model? Here are the top features to look out for when you are ready to invest in a time tracking software:

• Automatic Time Tracking

The automatic and real-time tracking of tasks is the most important feature to focus on. Knowing how your employees are scheduling their work becomes easier if their time is being monitored. The best time tracking software offers detailed reports about an employee’s work progress which also gives key insight about the overall timeline for the project.  

Without this feature it can become quite difficult to determine how much time an employee spends on unnecessary tasks. These tasks can include spending excessive time on phone calls, communicating with peers about projects for longer than required, or simply checking social media platforms frequently. A time tracking software will be able to clearly capture all of this, thus shedding light on an employee’s efficiency. 

• Automatic invoice generation

This is a highly necessary feature if a company bills clients by the hour. This feature accurately tracks all hours invested by an employee for a particular client and automatically generates an invoice based on pre-fixed rates. This brings transparency in the billing process and leaves no room for mistakes. 

Nowadays, time tracking softwares has online accounting integrated with QuickBooks making employee salary calculations easier. When employees log in and log out from the software, the clocked time is recorded on a timesheet, which is used for payroll generation. 

• Easy User Interface

An easy-to-use interface that employees can get familiar with quickly proves to be a big help, especially since most employees find it tedious to maintain time logs. A time tracking software must seamlessly be working in the background without distracting your employees with redundant details.

Since your employees will be using the software every day, it is very important that it is easy to navigate. A user friendly interface showcases all the necessary information in one place, saving employees a lot of valuable work time on a daily basis. 

• Mobile app

Our mobile phones have made our lives so much simpler by making everything available on-the-go. A mobile compatible time tracking software makes it easy to log in hours from any location, thus providing a lot of convenience. This becomes a very important factor when monitoring teams working remotely.

A lot of times employees face bad internet connectivity while working from a remote work location. The time tracking app on their phone can effectively monitor their work being done offline and save accurate timesheet data. As soon as they have a better network, it automatically syncs the timesheets with the company server. This removes any discrepancies that may arise while billing in such situations.

• Custom Reporting

One of the biggest advantages of time tracking is access to data that can be revealing when it comes to matters of productivity and work delegation. While almost every time tracking software offers at least some sort of time tracking data, the basic features are not usually enough to make informed business decisions. This is where custom reporting data can do wonders.

Moreover, access to custom data, along with the ability to assign custom permissions can also enable organisations to identify and eliminate productivity bottlenecks in their processes. Even one of the most feared challenges associated with time tracking, the rise of micro-management, can be overcome with the help of custom reporting. With it, you can simply remove unnecessary data from the reports that will be made available to the team leaders and managers.

Conclusion

It is very important to be clear about your business needs when looking for time tracking software. Your business type will highly influence the features you’ll require the most. With that said, the features mentioned in this article should cover most of the basic needs that time tracking can fulfill. We hope the above-mentioned features will help you in making an informed decision when you’re looking out for a time tracking software for your organization.