The Equation for Accurate Time Tracking Reports

This one expense likely takes up the most space on your firm’s profit and loss statement. It’s also the reason you might lose sleep if cash starts to become tight. Salaries and wages are most likely your firm’s biggest outlay and requires a business management software that is up to the task of helping you monitor your firm’s most valuable asset.

BQE BillQuick not only helps you analyze how employees spend their time at work, it also helps your workers be as accurate as possible when entering information - because what good is a report if the information that gets entered into your software is flawed to begin with?

Here are three ways to ensure the time tracking reports that you rely on to make important business decisions are as accurate as possible:

Pre-populated projects and activities

It’s the end of a long day, or perhaps a long week. Your employees are entering their time and trying to jog their memory over what they worked on at 8 o’clock this morning, or perhaps even what they were doing 8 o’clock Monday morning.

You can help employees recall this information by doing a little work on the front end of a project. BillQuick lets you create project IDs and activity IDs so when an employee logs into their BillQuick account, only a list of clients and projects the employee is currently working on appears in a drop-down menu.

Instead of scrolling through your firm’s entire list and risk the chance of selecting the wrong client, each employee only needs to scroll through one or two dozen client names to find the one they’re looking for.

Enter start and stop times

The other art to filling out a time sheet is “eyeballing” how much time was spent on an activity. The phrase “I think I started at 9:45. Or was it 10:45?” is probably muttered by more of your employees to themselves than you think.

BillQuick features an option where employees can record their start and end times for an activity in quarter-hour increments. This feature helps your employees in two different ways: First, no remembering needed. When beginning an activity, go into BillQuick and enter the start time.

The second benefit of using this feature is eliminating repetitive data entry. The normal habit of an employee may be to jot down an activity’s start and end times on either a notepad or a spreadsheet, then transfer that information into your firm’s time tracking software either at the end of the day or week. With BillQuick, your workers only need to enter this information one time into the software.

This feature is located under the “Sheet View” screen in BillQuick. Click on the “Choose Columns to Hide/Show” button and click the box next to “Start Time” and “Stop Time”.

Do it daily

“So what did you do over the weekend?”

Sometimes this simple question on a Monday morning from a co-worker elicits a blank stare from you, followed by a few seconds of pondering. Then you offer the phrase, “You know, it’s funny you should ask that. I can’t remember what I did this weekend!”

If you can’t remember the exciting activities you did yesterday or two days before, how are you supposed to remember in any great detail what you spent your time on at work?

The best way to ensure that your time tracking reports are accurate is for your employees to enter time every day. No exceptions. Make it your firm’s policy. It’s human nature that you remember more details of something that actually happened the same day.

It may take a few pain-staking weeks to get into a new habit, but your employees will feel good walking into work on a Friday morning knowing they don’t have five days-worth of time to record before heading home for the weekend.

BillQuick also has a free mobile app that makes it easy for your staff to track their time and expenses, wherever they are, without logging into BillQuick on their desktops or laptops.