Evolve Your Business

5 ways to optimise the business with time tracking

As an entrepreneur you need to spend your time the best way, and place the hours where they have the greatest yield. But it may be difficult to estimate where one's efforts will bear the biggest fruit, and if the hours could be used better.

13 Jan 2014 | 3 min read
Sascha Skydsgaard
”Rather action movies than love movies” is one of Sascha Skydsgaard’s mottos. It also characterises her more than 12 years tour de force in TimeLog. As TimeLog’s CSO, she works tirelessly to keep the organisation up to date and optimise our internal processes.

By using time tracking for all hours, not only customer related, you can analyse where the biggest yield is found, on both customer related activities and in the company as a whole. Here is a guide that shows how time tracking on tasks, projects and customers actually drives your business forward:

1. How much do we invest – and in what? 

When all hours, including internal hours, are measured, you suddenly find out how many hours you can actually invoice, and in the long run which activities yield a profit and revenue. This way, you can prioritise your time spent on sales, customer service and administration.   

2. Eliminate the guessing 

By using time tracking you will get better at estimating deliveries and minimise the guessing. You gain experience from projects and tasks and make the growth plan more realistic, concurrently knowledge sharing increases throughout the company.

3. Better resource planning

When you track time, and get better at estimating the time consumption on the tasks, you will also be more efficient. This is a natural consequence of the more exact estimation of tasks and projects.

4. Greater insight 

The estimations are especially important on fixed price projects, and after some time you will notice if particular tasks in the project makes the time plan collapse.   

5. Simplification of staff management 

With clear resource planning based on time plans it is easy to keep track of vacation, flex and illness. Staffing during vacation or illness can easier be adressed so that no tasks are left undone.  

Case: Increased revenue with 268.000€ 

A TimeLog customer had grown tired of the missing revenue on projects and customers. The problem was that on most projects the budgets were exceeded, and at the same time they were behind in time tracking.  

By implementing a more systematic time tracking, it became visible which projects gave revenue and which not. The problem was that the projects were sold too cheap. By tracking all hours, also the internal, the company increased their revenue with 268.000 € the following financial year.

Numbers on time – regardless of company size

Regardless of company size, time tracking can help you start a dialogue of what time is used on and if it is used on the correct tasks. Data makes you calm and forms the basis of talking strategy, action plans and task division. You do not need to guess, but make qualified decisions, both now and in the future.

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