Why is it important to understand time spent? The single greatest expense your firm endures is related to labor. Understanding where your staff is spending their time (which activities and which projects), provides you with a fundamental awareness of how your business is doing. How much a work hour is really worth.
We use the phrase ‘time is money’ to refer to the fact that, if we manage our time well, we can also increase our earnings. Time is, you may have heard people say, one of the most important things that we have in our life. Giving someone the gift of your time (for instance, by taking the time to visit them, to help them out with something around the house, or just to listen to them talk when they have had a stressful day) can be just as meaningful—and often even more meaningful—than buying a gift. So why don’t we view the time spent to complete a project as valuable as any tangible item for the project?
The Importance of Measuring Time Spent for Your Business
Imagine trying to bake a cake and you have the ingredients pulled out of the pantry: flour, salt, baking powder, eggs, sugar, butter, flavorings. However, you are missing the measurements needed for each item to make the cake. You also don’t have a recipe to follow: how to put ingredients together or how long to bake the cake. How are you going to make the cake correctly or even know if you have enough time to make the cake without more information?
The cost of items and the time needed to complete tasks are part of the ‘ingredients’ of your business. There is the cost of the office, furniture, supplies, people/salaries, utilities, etc. And then there is the cost of TIME spent to complete the job.
During the pandemic, many costs of doing business are going up with less income coming in. One way to help your bottom-line is to review the costs and see what can be reduced.
Let’s look at the restaurant business as an example. Restaurants cook and serve food. A restaurateur needs cooks, food, servers, busboys, a restaurant space, and so on. During COVID-19, many restaurants have struggled to find ways to keep their doors open. They have reduced their staff and reduced their supply of food, but the small amount of business they’re able to keep up with just carryout and delivery is, often, not enough. What about the industries where time is your service, such as lawyers, architects, engineers, designers?
The time you spend doing your job is important to factor into the cost of doing business. You would not expect to go to a designer and have them design something without paying them for their service. A designer has costs to think of beyond the tangible items: an office, desk, pencils, paper. The time they spend to do the work, the time spent on the related tasks, and time to review and change what is needed are all costs of the project/job.
Measuring time spent can help businesses better budget and estimate what it will realistically take to complete a project so they can set a dollar amount for that time.
How BQE CORE Measures Time Spent to Increase Profits
BQE CORE measures the time spent on tasks and services when completing a project, job, or matter. The goal is to help you understand the amount of time spent and how it affects your bottom-line. This is especially important during Covid-19 when business owners are more aware of costs and trying to find ways to trim back excess.
Using CORE’s time spent module, managers can review how much time is spent to complete each task. From there, they can look at how much time was budgeted and highlight discrepancies. Understanding how time is spent can help managers better prepare and set up for the next project.
By using CORE’s time spent module, you also avoid setting excess hours as non-billable hours, which can greatly decrease your profits. If time was spent to complete a task, you should be paid for it. In CORE, time is still measured against the project even if it is not billable. In this way, you can figure out why that time was spent and adjust budgets and billing as necessary. Was the time spent on making changes, which kept adjusting the timeline of the project completion? That time cost the business on profit for the project.
Time is Money; CORE Can Help
Creating a budget for time and assigning a dollar value to that time is a big part of doing business. If projects are constantly going over budget, profits will be affected. More time spent means more dollars spent to complete the task/project. Time is money in a literal sense. At work, we are paid for the time that we spend working.
Having a product to help you manage your projects, and keep track of the time spent on a task, helps you manage the project and your business better. CORE helps you do just that. By better managing your time and costs, you’ll not only earn more, but you can spend your time on other valuable things in life.
