A popular saying reveals that true change is impossible without an awareness of the problem. By the same token, it doesn’t matter how much you want to improve your time management skills unless you first identify where all your time is going.
And while good time management is clearly crucial for achieving success in any field, tracking your time is especially vital for freelancers. Because they bill by the project or hour instead of receiving a weekly salary, freelancers’ time is literally money. From one-person company to multi-billion dollar enterprises one central function is time tracking.
They come in various names Time Card, Time sheet, clock in-clock out but the core function is the same time tracking & they help business owners answer the following important questions:
- How do you pay your employees & contractors?
- If you are in the services businesses then on what basis do you invoice your customers?
- How do you keep track of projects & times spent on project tasks when your employees or contractors are working remotely or across continents?
When time is money, why lose any second of it. After all you are in the business of making money. Time Tracker facilitates that process where you are not short changing your employees/contractors or your customers.
Most small companies start with a spreadsheet, then they graduate to using a sheet shared on a cloud service like Google or Dropbox, but these services do not come with built in auditing features where roles like Administrators, Managers, & Employees are defined & also they lack the features of setting up Projects & Tasks time tracking with approval chain. The benefits of using a cloud-based time tracking system are numerous & they are very inexpensive (most applications are <$10 per user per month), they are an excellent investment as they pay for themselves right away. Here are three reasons in which time-tracking software can improve your operations & profitability:
1. Improve Productivity
One of the key benefits of time tracking is that it allows you to see how well you stay on task. As a freelancer, you are likely working on multiple projects concurrently, and it’s easy to get distracted by an email or phone call from one client or another. By tracking your time accurately, you can determine whether your work schedule is too fragmented. After all, every time you abandon a project to take a call, you need to spend valuable time getting focused once again. Time tracking can help you stay on task, boosting productivity in the long term.
Along with recording their own time, small business owners should track work performed by employees and contractors and measure it against different projects to ensure that everyone is operating efficiently. Once you’ve assessed the value of various projects, you can determine how best to utilize your time moving forward.
2. Develop Realistic Estimates
Most freelancers charge by the hour or by the project. And while billing clients in this manner is a great way to keep them happy—they know what they can expect to pay for your services upfront—a large percentage of freelancers underestimate the time it will take them to accomplish a given project. Once you start tracking your time accurately, you can adjust your billing as needed and boost overall performance for your business & better still provide realistic estimates to clients which leads to greater customer satisfaction & repeat business offers.
3. Get Paid Faster
One of the unfortunate facts of freelancing is that clients can be slow in paying their bills. By showing your client exactly how you spent your time—down to the minute—you can reduce instances of disparity and disagreement. Additionally, you can easily translate your timesheet into a detailed invoice for billing purposes.
Start Tracking Your Time More Accurately
At accurants, we are committed to helping freelancers develop a greater awareness of the amount of time they spend on different projects in order to maximize earnings in the long term. accurants provides one of the most comprehensive cloud-based Time Tracking system for 1-100 people companies. It has got Project Management & the Administrator, Project Manager, & Employee roles built in & seamlessly integrated with Time Tracking module. After the initial set up, it literally takes seconds to log time & you can do that from any device anywhere you are online. For more information about how accurants can revolutionize your small business operations, register for a 30-day free trial online.