People sometimes hate tracking their time, but you HAVE TO DO IT!
Remembering to press that button, turn it on, turn it off, and make sure it is correct can be kind of a pain, as well as time-consuming. But, you’ve got to do it.
What you don’t know CAN AND WILL hurt you.
If you aren’t tracking your time, then you don’t know:
- How much time you used on a project.
- How on or off-budget you are.
- How profitable the project is.
- How well your company is performing.
- Who is being profitable and who is not.
- Where money is being wasted.
Over the years, we’ve used a lot of different time-tracking tools. Recently, we were using Toggl.com, and moved to GetHarvest.com. The reason for that was that while Toggl was a great tool, we needed something that was a little bit beefier in exporting and reporting than that system.
What to do with time tracking information
Now we are taking all of that information, and every time somebody logged something, pulling it into a spreadsheet through Zapier, then running reports on it for profitability, manager efficiency, worker efficiency, project and task profitability, and comparing all of this against our initial estimates from BrainLeaf. Toggl is a great tool, and it works for a lot of companies, and Harvest is a little bit more expensive, but we needed something that would enable for more integrations, better reporting, and regular, automated exports.
It doesn’t matter what time tracking tool you use as long as you use something.
On top of knowing your business, your clients want to know what you’re doing with their money, and if you have great time tracking then you can show them whenever they ask.
If you are consistently giving them reports on how things are going and what you’re doing with the project; how the project is moving and how many hours are being used, that helps them understand how much time it takes to get things done. This is critically important for your client expectation management.
So, take the time, do the work, be professional, and track your time.
