How Does Time Tracking Help Engineers?

Time tracking software offers much more than just a digital time card. You can use it to analyze and optimize processes, track collaborative project progress, and save valuable time for your staff.

For engineers, powerful time tracking helps you build efficient workflows and improve project estimations. The data gained from tracking your time allows you to understand how long tasks and projects take, where time is lost on a project, and how you can replicate success in the future. With automated time recording, you develop a better understanding of your firm’s productivity and profits.  

Time Tracking Software

What it does

Time tracking makes life easier for everyone at your firm by streamlining workflows for your accounting, HR, and IT team members. And wouldn’t you prefer to focus solely on your engineering work instead of tedious administrative tasks? 

Rather than manually tracking and entering your time, there are numerous user-friendly time tracking software options built for engineers that effortlessly capture every second spent on a project, including client calls and site visits. With a platform like BQE CORE, you spend only two minutes per day on time entry while gaining greater visibility into your work hours. 

A time tracking system also boosts accountability and organization across projects. CORE’s real-time dashboards track and display both individual and collaborative project progress, offering transparency, fostering teamwork and accountability, and helping you spot at-risk deadlines across the team before something goes wrong.

Time tracking features to look for

General Time Tracking 

Popular time tracking tools offer features like time recording, overtime calculators, timesheets, automated invoicing, timers, activity reports, and integrations. Using your time tracker to generate reports that give you insight into your firm’s activity is a simple, powerful way to monitor progress and productivity, and many programs do this automatically. 

Many tracking software options also include features that support other aspects of your business, such as invoicing and accounting. A comprehensive project management system like CORE not only helps you capture your billable hours and expenses with ease, it also automates your billing process and lets clients pay you online.  

Time Tracking for Engineers

For engineers, we recommend that you look for a tool with a wide breadth of features to support complex project plans and your active work style. If you commonly have client meetings, site visits, vendor coordination, and other types of work that happen away from your desk, you need an on-the-go tracking system. CORE offers GPS tracking and an iOS mobile app that’s accessible on your desktop and smartphone, so you can track time and expenses and use project management tools any time, anywhere. 

A major perk of time tracking applications is the operational insights they offer. Once you’re precisely tracking your workday, you know exactly what your process looks like, how much time is spent planning, fine-tuning, and designing. Inefficient workflows, interruptions, and distractions become apparent, which you can plan for and avoid on future projects. A time tracker will help every engineer at your firm work more productively and introduce future-proofing solutions like new tools, additional project staff, updated processes, and adjusted expectations.

Once you know how long different tasks and project phases tend to take, you can set more realistic estimates for future work. That means being able to hit more competitive project deadlines, set profitable rates to adequately cover project costs, and identify what clients and projects are worth taking on. 

Time Tracking with BQE

Engineers need all of the help they can get to guarantee they have enough time in the day to finish their actual engineering work. BQE CORE is a 100% DCAA-compliant time tracking and project management solution that’s perfect for engineers, offering a wide range of functionality for time and expense tracking, billing and invoicing, and accounting and billing. The platform’s built-in business intelligence gives you and your clients real-time visibility into project progress, employee productivity, costs, budgets, and more.  

BQE CORE’s features include pre-filled timesheets, easy-to-use timers, automated reminders, customizable invoice templates, and automatic billing. Smart, pre-populated timesheets with custom date ranges coupled with the ability to copy timesheets, help you save hours each week across your team. 

The platform’s helpful reminders ensure on-time, accurate time capture every reporting period, including regular hours, overtime, sick days, vacation time, and holidays. Automated invoicing makes your billing process quick and simple for everyone. CORE’s customizable invoicing templates fulfill the needs of every type of project and client, including retainer invoices, recurring invoices, percent completion invoices, fixed invoices, and hourly invoices.

With built-in reporting, you know exactly how much time is spent on a project/task, how many hours an employee worked, and how active or unproductive a team member was during a specific period. Having access to this precise information helps you improve project scheduling and resource distribution in future projects. 

BQE Software is trusted by 400,000+ users worldwide, has more than 25 years of experience, and is backed by 24/7/365 award-winning customer support for any guidance you may need. Book a demo today to see how BQE can help your engineering firm’s performance and profitability!

Time Tracking Software FAQs 

What is an overtime calculator?

• CORE’s overtime calculator analyzes existing time entries and automatically marks them as overtime, depending on your specified criteria. It’s usually used at the end of a pay period with the ability to define rules that are only applicable when viewing all data. As wage rules vary based on location, this feature is flexible to accommodate the most complex overtime regulations and ensure your business is always compliant.

What if I need to change my hours after BQE has recorded them?

• Depending on your security permissions, you can edit time entries after submitting them for approval or even after they’re approved.

Can my engineering firm set up multi-level time and expense approval?

• Yes, with CORE, you can set up a single-level or multiple-level of a submit-approve workflow.