The question has been raised, Can time tracking help  you make money?  And more specifically, Can a timesheet help you make money?  That's a difficult  question because you can make money both with and without any tool like a  timesheet.  But does a timesheet actually help you make money?  The  answer is yes.

Service-Based Companies (consultants, contractors, services): For contracting companies, the answer is probably a no-brainer.   Contractors must make sure they are billing every possible hour to their  clients.  They must also be able to document every time log that was  billing.  What happens if your client comes back and asks you about a  certain block of time?  Do you have documentation?  If not, you'll  likely lose that block of time.

Misplacing billable hours is a nightmare scenario for services-based companies.   If you are losing hours now, you may not even realize it.  One way to  recuperate those hours is to lock down your timesheet just before billing  clients.  This prevents more hours from being added to them.  Consider  this scenario: Consultant works for client... enters hours into timesheet...  bookkeeper bills client... consultant adds a few more hours after the bill has  already gone out.  Oops!  That time is lost!  The bookkeeper  doesn't know to bill it later, and the consultant doesn't know that date range  has already been billed.  Those are the type of scenarios a time-keeping  product prevents.

You can also spend a lot of unnecessary time preparing client invoices.  So a timesheet helps you make money by replacing those extra monthly hours with a few clicks.  That's the beauty of automation.  Manpower is replaced by clicks.

 

Return on Investment   Calculations are based on effective billing rate of only $50 per consultant.

 

Item (per consultant)	Time Spent	Cost Savings (per month)
Unbilled hours lost each month	2 hour per mo.	$100
Client invoice preparation	1 hour per mo.	$50
Documentation	1/10 hour per mo.	$10
Total	3.1 hours/mo.	$155, $1,860/yr. (per consultant)

 

Manufacturing Companies (with projects): Tracking time to projects is pretty important.  Here's why: There are  always a lot of possible projects to take on.  So you must choose the ones  that make money for your company.  Pick a bunch of losers and you lose.   Even spending too much time on secondary projects is a bad idea.  You must find the projects that make the most revenue and stick with them.  But how  can you tell which projects you are actually spending your time on?  Or how  can you tell if you are spending the most time on the highest projects?  That's what a timesheet does for you.  After a few months of tracking  hours, you'll know which projects you've spent the most time on.  It's really just that simple.

 

Track Time to Highest Priority Projects

 

 

Also see: Video: Consulting Software, Part 1, Video: Timesheet Features for Manufacturing Companies, Video: Graph of Project Revenue

 

Back to Videos

 

More videos on YouTube